Damn Those Two Little Gardeners!

It's an ugly truth. Margaret Wise Brown, beloved children's author and master of the soporific line, has kicked my ass.

This has nothing to do with her magnum opus. With its bowls of mush and quiet old women whispering "hush," Goodnight, Moon leaves me cold. For the book's faux- Flemish interiors lend it an air of religious quietude that relegates it firmly to the realm of infancy. This is especially true for the board-book version, which (I admit) does stand up rather well to the ravages of early childhood.

Our daughter, for one, has moved on to more sophisticated fare. Dr. Seuss is a favorite, of course. Ever more popular is the inimitable Everyone Poops, with its sublime gesture toward universality.

Yet the past months have been dominated by The Two Little Gardeners, a hitherto-unknown work in the Margaret Wise Brown canon. I started reading the book to A. in late July. By mid August I had to force it out of the rotation. But it was too late. I was utterly stricken: I could no longer write. I could barely enter the kitchen. What happened?

It was those damned children.

The story portrays two rosy-cheeked youngsters who, for all their alleged youth, comport themselves like an old married couple. Sporting floppy sun hats and high-waisted pants, they look octegenarian rather than eight. Perhaps someone miscarried a decimal point. In the early moments of the book they till the soil and plant seeds. In subsequent pages we follow the garden's progress as its vegetables begins to grow and flower. We learn about the challenges of drought and garden pests. Later, with all such conflicts resolved, our protagonists witness the garden's teeming splendor.

The story reaches its denouement in a flurry of alliteration: "The corn tassels bloomed/ And the pumpkins got fat/ And the beans grew long/ And the carrots pushed up through the ground/ And the cabbages looked like great green roses all in a row./ Day after day something was ripe and ready to pick."

To this point, I'm fine with the whole proposition. The garden grows, and produces vegetables. Dandy, I say. I get a CSA farm share delivered to my door— more or less the same thing. Just without the tilling, or the toiling, or the smug pride of a season-long agricultural project.

It's the next part that kills me. Our plucky heroes cook and cook and cook, boiling and baking everything in large casserole dishes. Then they get all gussied up in their Sunday best and gorge themselves.

But does this satisfy our little do-gooders, those apple-cheeked savants who bear the wisdom of the ages. No, far from it.

The little bastards go to work canning and preserving everything else. And here Brown's endless litanies become tauntingly matter-of fact: "So they put up some things in cans and jars and bottles/ and stored them away on the shelves."

Look at the picture! Onions hanging in bunches. Carrots plunged into barrels of sand. Potatoes and pumpkins heaped up in bins. Squash splayed out like Phoenician soldiers on the battlefield.

It's downright humiliating, I tell you.

Now, I've tried; I've tried. First it was the cordials: capturing the essence of summer fruit in liquid form, like bugs under a bell. And during the past few weeks, we've made an extra effort to keep abreast with the season's bounty.

One week it was giardiniera— cauliflower, radishes, green beans, carrots, and broccoli, lightly brined— of which there remain two Ball jars somewhere near the back of the fridge.

The next week it was fresh dill cucumber pickles, made without vinegar; these disappeared within days.

And recently I tried my hand at making tomato jam, to modest success (the jam is tasty although the consistency isn't quite right: it's a bit too runny to qualify as jam). Will any of this last beyond next Wednesday? Fat chance. Will it fill a larder with tidy rows of jars and bottles to last all winter long?

Margaret Wise Brown has, in short, left me a quivering wreck. Damn those two little gardeners! But I smell a rat (and, out of spite, I might add that the little dog in the illustration above might be smelling a rat as well). Is it really possible for a simple little garden plot to yield quite as much as it does in this accursed little book?

And can such quaint little children really be relied on to sterilize their jars and bottles properly? Just think of the bacteria! I'm just relieved that Brown didn't decide to follow the Two Little Gardeners into the Fall, when they begin potting tripe, pickling pig's feet, and making blood sausage.