"Correction does much, but encouragement does more." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe --

The Family Under the Bridge

 

Title: The Family Under the Bridge

Author: Natalie Savage Carlson

Rating: ★★★★★

Ages: 6 - 14

    Back Cover Synopsis: 

    Once there was an old man named Armand who lived under a bridge in Paris. Everything he owned could be pushed around in an old baby buggy without a hood - it was easy for him to move from place to place. Armand loved his solitary, carefree life. Children, he said, were like starlings, and one was better off without them. 

    But the children who lived under the bridge knew a true friend when they saw one, even if that friend was a little bit grumpy to begin with. And it did not take Armand long to see he had gotten himself a ready-made family - one he loved with all his heart, and one he would have to find a better home than the bridge.  

"Be somebody who makes everybody feel like somebody." -- Unknown --

Mending Wall by Robert Frost

Mending Wall

by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

"I came, I saw, I conquered." -- Julius Caesar --

"When you can tell your story and it doesn't make you cry, you know you have healed." -- Unknown --

"Take time for all things: great haste makes great waste." -- Benjamin Franklin --