Once I had a plan for how to organize the animal examples in Thank You,
Moon, I needed a
beginning and an ending. In early drafts, I started by contrasting bright
nights and dark ones, but I kept looking back at my original brainstorming
sheet.
I loved the phrase “constant companion in space” and I wanted to
highlight the most important reason to be thankful for the Moon early on. We
couldn’t exist without it. Thank goodness it regulates our planet’s seasons.
After playing around with these two ideas for a while, I realized that
the main text could combine them into a two-part opener that would follow the
same format as the animal pairs later in the book:
[First
spread] “Thank you, Moon, for being Earth’s constant companion in space.
[Second
spread] and making life on our planet possible.”
Then
the secondary text would provide details to explain Earth’s wobble and the role
of the Moon’s gravitational pull.
So
I had a beginning, but what about an ending?
Again,
I looked at my brainstorming sheet and noticed this note: “surprise—daytime
too—Caroline.” Caroline is my youngest niece, and this note was referring to a
memory.
When Caroline was in kindergarten and her sister, Claire, was in second grade, I did
a school visit at their school in Maine. They wanted to ride to school with me
rather than take the bus, and on the way, I spotted the Moon.
“Oh,
look, there’s the Moon,” I said, pointing out the passenger-side window.
Claire,
who was on that side of the car, could easily see it. “Oh yeah. Cool,” she
replied.
But Caroline couldn’t see it. She squirmed wildly in her car seat. “Where? Where?” she asked. As her frustration built, she exclaimed, “I’ve never seen the Moon in the day in my whole long life!”
So
I pulled the car over, and we all got out to admire that lovely, surprising
daytime Moon.
I’ll
never forget Caroline’s joy and astonishment in that moment. She was
discovering something new and exciting about how nature works.
I’m
sure you’ll agree that, even as an adult, spotting the Moon in the day still a
special treat. It feels a tiny bit magical because you aren’t expecting it. I
wanted to capture that emotion at the ending of the book, so I wrote:
“But
most of all, thank you, Moon.
for enchanting us with your ever-changing beauty,
night after night,”
and,
sometimes, surprising us in the daytime, too.”
So
the book starts with a collective us [all living things] and ends with a
narrower us [humans beings]. When I received the sketches created by
illustrator Jessica Lanan, I was delighted that her art matched what I had
tried to convey with words.
By
bringing my personal experience with my niece to the book-making process, by
integrating it into the facts, I created an ending that I hope will resonate
with readers.
On Saturday, Maria
Gianferrari and I will be doing a
presentation and signing copies of her book Fungi Grow
and my book Thank You, Moon:
Celebrating Nature’s Night Light at 11:00 a.m. at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore
in Acton, MA.
If you live in eastern
Massachusetts, we hope you’ll join us.
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One Response
All of these books look so fabulous! I can’t wait to read them.