18 July 2004 IDA B...AND HER PLAN TO MAXIMIZE FUN, AVOID DISASTER, AND (POSSIBLY) SAVE THE WORLD by Katherine Hannigan, HarperCollins/Greenwillow, September 2004, Ages 9-14, ISBN 0-06-073024-2, LIBRARY ISBN: 0-06-073025-0

"Scenes of my young years were warm in my mind

Visions of shadows that shine

Till one day I returned and found they were the

Victims of the vines

Of changes"

--Phil Ochs, "Changes"

The first of this year's Gravenstein apples are piled up in crates and bins over at Andy's Farm Basket, which sits alongside the road halfway between here and downtown Sebastopol. Driving to the feed store yesterday morning, I passed a pair of lumbering flatbeds hauling huge harvest boxes that were brimming with what has long become my favorite apple in the world.

The Gravenstein apple has maintained its star status in Sebastopol since local plant guru Luther Burbank turned Nathaniel Griffith on to them in the late 1800s. For more than a hundred years now, our little community has sponsored an annual Apple Blossom Parade with dignitaries, floats, fire trucks and marching bands, as well as an annual Gravenstein Apple Fair. (This year's fair is August 14-15 and John Dawson will be bringing out his Twenty-first century version of New Riders of the Purple Sage on that Sunday afternoon.)

Back in the mid-1980s when I purchased this farm, up here in the coastal hills, it was bordered on three sides by Gravenstein orchards. The fourth, downhill side still reveals a panoramic view of valleys and hills, extinct volcanic mountains, The Geysers (which are now pretty well played out), the city of Santa Rosa, and the old Gravenstein cannery which is nowadays leased out in little segments to small food processors and industrial fabricators.

Over my twenty years in Sebastopol, the established Gravenstein orchards have gradually been replaced to a large degree by new vineyards. I used to be hedged into the middle of a blossoming springtime fairyland; now the Gravenstein trees on my north and west sides have been torn out, burned, and replaced by grape trellises. (Yes, it was a nasty, dusty, sad couple of years while that was happening.)

I can gaze out past Laguna Road, where Nathaniel Griffith got it all going during the Victorian era. There, too, the apple orchards vie with vineyards and upscale horse pastures to maintain a toehold.

"I tell you life is sweet

in spite of the misery

there's so much more

be grateful"

--Natalie Merchant, "Life is Sweet"

Ida B. likes Macintosh apples best. (They actually used to also be my favorite, prior to my moving to California and discovering Gravensteins.)

" 'Come on, Rufus,' I called to Daddy's old floppy-eared dog, who was napping under the table. 'You can come, too, so you'll have some company.'

"Now, a school of goldfish could go swimming in the pool of drool that dog makes while he's sleeping. But as soon as he heard his name and saw me heading for outside he jumped up and cleaned up the extra slobber around his mouth, and in two and one-half seconds' time, he was waiting for me at the back door."

Ida B. Applewood is a precocious and rambunctious young lady growing up in Wisconsin who regularly converses with the old apple trees and the lively brook that share her parents farm. Her dad has taught her that credo about leaving a place better than you find it, and she fully expects that the farm will one day be hers. Ida B. has bestowed names on each of those beloved trees, in the same manner that you'd name a dog Rufus, or a cat Lulu.

Ida B. is also a child who takes comfort in the consistencies in her life and can catch a case of the blues when faced with uncertainty.

"I stared down at all those little raisins that used to seem so happy bobbing around like they were swimming, but now they looked like they were drowning in a sea of milk."

Since suffering an emotionally traumatic start to kindergarten--thanks to a teacher with too many rules and too little understanding for this unusual girl--Ida B.'s parents have provided her an alternative, working to properly homeschool her while still leaving Ida B. plenty of time to enjoy her personal dreamland out in the apple trees.

But then her mother gets sick and Ida B.'s whole world comes crashing down.

"That cancer was like bugs in a tree: one day you don't see them at all and the next it seems like they're everywhere, eating the leaves and the fruit. And it won't work to find them and squish them one by one. You have to do something drastic.

"So Mama went to the hospital for treatments, and when she'd come home she'd be so tired, she had to work just to say, 'Hi, baby.' "

Because Ida B. doesn't live in one of those civilized nations of the world that provide universal health coverage, her parents must sell off part of the farm (containing some of Ida B.'s beloved wooden confidants) in order to pay the medical bills. And on top of Ida B.'s despair because of her friends getting chainsawed to make room for the new owner's new house, as well as having to now share some of her special places with the kid in that new house, Ida B. is forced amid these terrible circumstances to begin attending the public school that had caused her such distress four years earlier. It was a teacher who screwed up Ida B.'s school experience the first time around; it will be an educator of a very different stripe who will try to guide Ida B. through having to deal with her attitudes and deep fears when she walks into the public school now.

IDA B. is a charming first novel by one of Kate DiCamillo's writing students. It's a wonderful rhapsody about the American family farm. (Hopefully some of the young readers will, indeed, ponder why it is that in America so many families are forced to "sell the farm" if someone gets sick or injured.)

Meanwhile, I've been busy thinking up names for the eight young Gravenstein trees that I--ever the contrarian--planted in-between the house and the goat pasture a few years ago, after seeing my good friends next door hacked down in their prime.

Richie Partington

http://richiespicks.com

BudNotBuddy@aol.com