Fairy Tales Fire the Imagination

Our imaginations are running rampant this weekend with Halloween, All Saints, and Dia de los Muertos celebrations.

A recent solo fall hike turned my imagination to fairy tales. The best known fairy tales and folk tales began as stories told hundreds of years ago and retold to each new generation. Many fairy tales, especially the ones from Europe, take place in a forest. Maybe Hansel and Gretel dropped bread crumbs in a place like this:

Will the Billy Goats Gruff's troll give me passage across this bridge?

Does a gingerbread house or big bad wolf lurk around this corner?

Is that La Llorona I hear weeping?

The Wizard of Oz is not a true fairy tale; still these trees remind me of the scene where Dorothy and her friends were attacked by the enchanted apple trees:

(Here's the scene, in case you forgot:)

Fairy tales hold some universal appeal to us as human beings in a world we can't control or fully understand. What is your favorite fairy tale or folk tale?

For more on fairy tales, see SurLaLune, the fairy tale website and my book, Once Upon a Time: Fairy Tales in the Library and Language Arts (or see my blog sidebar).

Jasmine Pickner, Hoop Dancer: Happy Native American Day!

Jasmine Pickner, world champion hoop dancer.

While many in the US celebrate Columbus Day on Oct. 10, South Dakotans celebrate Native American Day. South Dakota is home to more than 62,000 American Indians, many of whom live on nine reservations within the state. Most belong to the Great Sioux Nation and are also identified by their tribal band and dialect.

I was fortunate to see world champion hoop dancer Jasmine Pickner perform recently at the SD Indian Education Summit. She started at age 7, taught by her grandparents. In this male-dominated field, Pickner uses her hoops to portray the balance of male and female. With her hoops, she creates figures such as dragonflies and eagles.

Before her dance, she talked about her background. At one point in school, she had to choose between basketball hoops and dancing hoops. By then, the dancing hoops were part of her, and she continued to dance. Hoop dancing keeps her true to her culture and herself. When she has to make choices, she thinks about the hoops' representation of balance and life cycles. She says that her hoops keep her on the right path.

In addition to dancing, she now teaches others to hoop dance and gives presentations across the country about native culture where she answers school children's questions such as "Do you eat pilgrims?" and "Do you live in teepees?" Jasmine beautifully sets the record straight.

Enjoy her work in this video from the St. Joseph Indian School Pow Wow video from 2009:


What keeps you on the right path?

Late Summer Swan Song

Geese, ducks, and this swan let me visit them this Labor Day morning at Arrowhead Park, not far from home. This is Sioux Falls' newest park on an old Sioux quartzite quarry site, donated by Dale and Dorothy Weir. The intent is to preserve the land's natural state, while enhancing it for visitors. Other birders, walkers, and photographers were out to capture the natural beauty of the end of summer. Trails lead walkers beside ponds where quartzite was quarried and across prairie grasses to picnic tables and benches. From there, the valley below displays its rural riches.

Swans aren't all that common around here, but aerated ponds, abundant food and protection must appeal to this bird. I always think of The Ugly Duckling tale by Hans Christian Andersen. A classic German tale is The Swan Maidens, who are also the subject of Russian tales and Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake. In cultures worldwide, swans represent luck, grace, and healing. What swan stories do you know? I'll leave you with a segment of The Muppets adaptation of the famous ballet. This one is called "Swine Lake," of course:

Mmmm, Maple--another Wilder connection

(photo by Rain Rannu, http://www.flickr.com/photos/rainrannu/3150065155/)

One sample of Wisconsin pure maple syrup, and we were delightfully surprised! We knew that our usual "table syrup" was not real maple, but had no idea how good--and how much better for us--the real thing is. As one commenter on this blog said, it's like the difference between the sun and a florescent light bulb!

Our visit to Glenna Farms, between St. Croix Falls & Turtle Lake, taught us a lot about maple syrup. First, pure maple syrup is 100% natural and has no additives. Compare that with the ingredients of your usual table syrup.

Second, even though Glenna Farms is fewer than 100 miles from Laura Ingalls Wilder's birthplace, the modern maple syrup farmer has a much easier process than in Laura's day.

In Little House in the Big Woods, Laura describes the process as Pa explained it to her. Grandpa made wooden buckets and troughs out of cedar and white ash trees because those trees won't give the syrup a bad flavor. Pa tells her that when the weather warms in the spring, sap rises in the trees and Grandpa put a tap on each tree and hung a bucket on it. "The sap, you know, is the blood of a tree. It comes up from the roots, when warm weather begins in the spring, and it goes to the very tip of each branch and twig to make the green leaves grow."

(photo by jsorbius, http://www.flickr.com/photos/jsorbie/5527832157/)

Pa goes on to tell how the sap drips into the buckets, and Grandpa goes out on his sled everyday to check them and gather the sap into a barrel on the sled. Then he hauls it to a big iron kettle in the woods,where he lights a bonfire under it, and lets it cook. Every few minutes, Grandpa skims the boiling sap's surface with a wooden ladle so that it doesn't cook too fast. Grandpa cooks the sap until it condenses into syrup. Obviously, this is a very labor intensive process!

Glenna Farms uses a less labor-intensive method, letting gravity do the work. Each tapped tree is connected to tubing that allows the sap to flow through the tube and into a holding tank where it is filtered. From there, it is transferred to a vat, where an evaporator boils it down more quickly than using traditional methods. Let Ashley's field trip experience show you the process.

Here's our photo of Glenna Farms' sugar bush. Look closely toward the lower part of the trees and you will see the tubing from one tree to the next. The green shed on the right, the sugar house, is the tubing's destination and the place where the sap is cooked down to become syrup.

The result is nothing like the stuff most of us buy in the stores. No wonder it was the main source of sweetener for Laura Ingalls' family. They did not have to buy sugar and sometimes traded maple syrup or maple sugar for other necessities. The family ate it on corn cereal, hasty pudding, pancakes, and other foods.

(photo by Robert V. http://www.flickr.com/photos/ajohndoeproject/95792779/)

Here are a few fun facts about maple syrup:

-The Sugar Maple is Wisconsin's state tree.

-Maple Syrup Month runs from mid-March to mid-April in Wisconsin.

-Thirty to forty gallons of sap=1 gallon of syrup.

-Wisconsin is the 4th largest producer of maple syrup producer in the country.

Read more about maple syrup here, and pass the pancakes and French toast, please!

On the Wilder Side

(Image Copyright Paul Beaman. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic Licence. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.)

Sometimes it pays to get off the interstate and take what William Leat-Heat Moon calls "blue highways." We did just that recently, which took us into Spring Valley in southeastern Minnesota.

Driving through town, I saw a sign that said, "Wilder Museum." If you know me or follow this blog, you know that I'm a Laura Ingalls Wilder fan, and my antennae went up. "Wilder Museum? WILDER MUSEUM?" I said as I passed the sign. Luckily, there was another sign. This time, the vehicle turned right, and took us to the Wilder Museum, housed in the old Methodist Church. A sign in front of the church let us know that, yes, it was THAT Wilder.

(click on the picture and click again to enlarge)

Almanzo's parents, brothers, and sisters, and Almanzo himself helped build and attended that church. Almanzo and Laura attended this church from 1890-1891. Almanzo's sisters, Eliza Jane and Laura, were both married here. (You may remember Eliza Jane from Laura Ingall's books. Laura did not include Almanzo's sister Laura in the Little House books, as Laura Ingalls thought it would confuse readers to have two Lauras.)

Almanzo's brother, Royal, had several businesses on Main Street, but he was not the only well-known merchant in Spring Valley.

The museum holds items from another famous citizen, Richard Sears, founder of Sears Watch Company. When Alvah Roebuck joined the business, it became Sears & Roebuck. Almanzo and Richard Sears were friends back in those days.

This site is on the National Register of Historic Places, along with other Ingalls & Wilder sites.

How did I not know this? What a delightful stop! Though we didn't have time for the entire tour, a young lady showed us Wilder family photos in the first room and told us a few stories about their lives in Spring Valley. As a stroke of coincidence would have it, the young lady was born in the town where we live. We left feeling richer for having driven off the beaten path and making these discoveries.

What discoveries have you made lately? What delights have you found off the beaten path?

The Declaration of Independence

Happy Independence Day! Thanks to all those who work to keep us free.

Summer Reading

(photo by Enokson, http://www.flickr.com/photos/vblibrary/4664379322/)

The calendar is still a few days away from summer, and where I live, the temps have been more like spring, but as soon as school's out, everyone thinks "SUMMER!" In my world, that means "SUMMER READING!"

Libraries across the country collaborate on themes and materials, with posters by famous book illustrators, to offer summer reading programs for all ages. This year's theme is "One World, Many Stories." Prizes and special events abound to celebrate reading. See what your library has to offer!

(photo by Cloned Milkmen, http://www.flickr.com/photos/clonedmilkmen/5111779335/)

I have written about what to read, but this year I'm more interested in how. Print? Downloadable electronic books? Downloadable audio? Audio discs? Reading on the computer? New devices and programs make all of this possible. As one librarian said, "If it gets people to read, I'm all for it!"

Should we care in what format people (especially kids) are reading as long as they are reading? Stephen Abram, library futurist and trend follower, uses the term "format agnostic."

I do most of my professional reading on the computer. I don't own any fancy portable electronic devices--yet--so my fiction reading is old fashioned paperback or hardcover. Sometimes an ereader would be handy--for reading what a librarian friend calls "sternum crushers" in bed or for easy travel toting.

(photo by Liz Henry, http://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhenry/116516993/)

Here are some summer reading suggestions:
For kids: Nick's Picks
For kids and teens: from Horn Book
For adults: Seth's picks, fiction & nonfiction and Beach Reads

What are you reading in which format on which device? Why do you choose the format you do? In any case, happy reading!

(photo by US Mission Canada, http://www.flickr.com/photos/us_mission_canada/5537780170/)