The End

I recently published my first edited book,  Labor of Love: A Literary Mama Staff Anthology ,  with  Small Harbor Publishing . It's an anthology of writing from  Literary Mama  staff over the past 20 years. It's a beautiful collection and I am proud of the writers and proud to share the book.  It seems a fitting moment, as I pondered sharing about the book here on the blog, to reflect on my life as a blogger, and acknowledge that it is time to officially end this blog.   I started blogging in about 2007, when my baby was learning to toddle, when I was learning how to be a mother and stepmother, when I was just starting to see my way as a writer. I needed it back then. I craved it. I had a variety of blog iterations--family, art, creativity, writing things I delved into. There's a freedom in blogging, a casualness, an easy familiarity that's lacking (for me anyway) in other kinds of writing. I loved blogging and the words came pouring out.  Over the years since then, some
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The Drop in My Drink

Water.  We love it, we need it, we all depend on it. "All the water we have is all the water we've always had..."  and so begins the story of where the water dripping slowly out of the tap in my kitchen came from, and where it is going.

 Meredith Hooper and Chris Coady wrote a beautiful story when they created The Drop in My Drink.  But fantastical as this lengthy picture book is, it is also true. The water on Earth is as old as the planet itself, and yet also timeless. This book explores how every drop of water has cycled through the rivers, the ice sheets, the oceans, and the waves on its endless path around and around. It forms life, it is carried by wind, and it has soaked through countless bodies of penguins and dinosaurs and sunflowers.  And inevitably, it drips through each of us.

 This book was published in 1998 and has big words like eroding, substances, microorganisms, and evaporated, and tackles concepts like 390 million years ago, and how limestone caves form. But I read this book to my Earth Champs/Scouts group last weekend, and the young five to nine year olds were impressed by the story.  Impressed because they got it, they understood. Even with all those big words. With some stopping here and there for comments from both the other adults in the room and by our group's very smart kids, we waded happily through the water cycle.  

 While I admit my throat was a bit dry when I was done reading aloud, I felt like we all had gone on a journey. An amazing journey around the earth on a tiny droplet of water. More than anything this book gives its readers a sense of our place in the world. We are made of water, it flows through us, and it always has, and always will.
  

 STEM FridayThis post is my first post as an official contributor to STEM Friday.  Go to STEM Friday  for more info and great STEM books!  (STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)

Comments

Sue Heavenrich said…
Great review! thanks for sharing this book.
February 2, 2013 at 7:26 PM
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