Bibliophilia: The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton

The Little House - Her Story by Virginia Lee Burton

From 1942 and winner of the annual Caldecott Medal.

I have pretty vivid memories of reading a book when I was a child, while I was still living in Amsterdam, of a house that was out in the country, and as pages went on, a road was built and paved, and a town rose up around it, and then tenement houses, and then a tram, and then an elevated railway, and a subway, and eventually skyscrapers. I recall finding it all a bit...scary. That cloying sense of things becoming ever more crowded and hurried. It made a distinct impression on me, and every so often I would recall it. The thought occurred to me to see if I could track it down. I entered a variety of likely sounding terms into a search engine and there it was, a book from my childhood, decades later.

Neat to re-read it all these years later. And it still evoked the same feelings of unease in me about urban sprawl. I probably had no idea of it, and certainly wouldn’t have been able to articulate it at that age, but I knew something about farmland being relentlessly gobbled up by the outward spread of humanity made me uncomfortable. And I guess on some level, having that exposure at a young age made me conscious of trying to live a fairly low-impact life all these years.

If you have kids, it’s worth sharing with them.