Rootabaga Country

I love the second story with the strange but familiar sense of relationality. In this story the little girl is sent away to the Village of Liver-and-Onions, the apparent homeland of her ancestors, to visit her people. Her uncles and her uncle's uncles—on both sides, father's and mother's. I love the picture—you can see the different types, the bearded, suspendered rural types on the left and the stylish, long-coated citified fellows on the right. Don't know which is father's or mother's though. I guess only the artist knows that.

Anyway, little Wing Tip the Spick stands inspection by them and they are all impressed. Her uncles from both sides approve of her and say so—and in such beautiful language. Then, after some meaningful negotiation concerning the number of questions she is willing to answer, she begins to tell them about her home town and its major points of interest. Well, its one major point—its lack of weight.

She was raised in the Village of Cream Puffs, "a little light village on the upland corn prairie." Her village is light, so light that the wind tends to blow it away—at regular intervals, no less. But the people of the village, though light-minded, are nonetheless creative and inventive. They have in place a mechanical device that tethers it to its place and, when necessary, cranks it back home whenever it blows up into the sky. I think the Village of Cream Puffs, light and airy as it is, still contains the stuff of its serious ancestors back in the down-to-earth town of Liver-and-Onions, where the uncles still live.