Tasha Tudor

When I was little, my mother read us books by great children's authors, like Lois Lenski, Elizabeth Enright, A.A. Milne, E.B. White, Frank Baum.... I don't know if it was part of her French teachers training- I have to ask her.  But I am grateful to have been exposed to such great literature at such an early age.

My favorite books were the ones by Tasha Tudor.  I spent hours studying her illustrations- they included everything I loved: animals, flowers, old things.... I remember reading those biographies of famous people who lived long ago (the ones with the silhouette illustrations) and feeling a sense of nostalgia for a time gone by, even as an 8 year old. Tasha's pictures seemed to capture that time and keep it alive somehow.  I loved to draw, and copied her style and subject matter in my own little pictures.

The world Tasha created fascinated me, and as I grew older I began to learn more about her life and the somewhat eccentric way she had chosen to live it. She lived in New Hampshire, and then in Vermont, basically as a person would have lived in the 1800's.  She dressed in the clothes from that time that she made herself, grew her own food, had beautiful flower gardens, and painted. She was intelligent and yet had a child-like innocence- she loved creating marionettes and putting on puppet shows, playing with dolls and dollhouses, and her animals- corgis, goats, an assortment of birds, including her beloved pet rooster, Chickhominy.  She celebrated Christmas like no one else- I take out her book Take Joy every year to help me remember how to do it the right way.

Yesterday, I went with a friend to her house in Vermont.  I got to meet her family, and see her home and barn and gardens.  It was wonderful.  When I saw the little spot in her study, beside a window, where she sat in an old chair on a cushion across from her big beautiful fireplace and created all that art that had inspired me so much as a child, I thought I might cry.  Her grandson, Winslow, showed us around- he seemed to be from another era. He used words like "thusly" and when I asked him to take a picture of me with my friend, he said it was the first day he had ever used an iPhone.

He shared a lot of stories about his grandmother- he grew up on the same property and saw her every day.  Life with her was full of work, but there was plenty of play, too. Some of my favorite quotes of hers that he shared with us were- "If you're interested in doing something, don't just talk about it. Do it," and, "Be a ruthless gardener."