If I had a favorite age range, it would be 6-10 years, but when I was offered a temporary job in a preschool, I grabbed it. It was truly an eye-opener for me, watching them leave behind babyhood and learn to navigate social situations.  They learn the tough lesson that, while well cared for throughout the day, they don’t have the same emotional collateral in this new place. Pointing to something and letting out a yalp will not necessarily get your coat on your back. They learn to actually use their words, and it’s very impowering. They soak up the language at an astonishing rate and they're not afraid to use new words like, "bombastic" or "bifurcated" when they first hear them.

I’ll never forget my first day. I’d been asked to supervise the “Outdoor Classroom,” and I was sitting on a bench eating a granola bar when one little boy ran past me, then stopped. He said, “Oh, you’re new?” and I said, “Yes, this is my first day.”  Without missing a beat, he said, “Come with me, I’ll meet you to my class.”  We jogged over to the play equipment teaming with kids running across clatter bridges, escaping down the wavy slides, while some guarded the fort against would-be invaders. He got everyone’s attention and told them my name. Then he introduced each one in turn—all fifteen. They all stopped to say “hello,” then went back to their work. I had just been handed the germ for this story. As for the title, children of this age use a lot of words and don’t mind swapping out their usage, which I find so endearing. To enroll in a preschool would be the same thing as joining a preschool, but one has so much more control if one joins rather than enrolls!

Music was a constant in the classroom; classical for quieter times, silly songs for lots of movement as they play and work or learn new skills.  There are tons of silly songs out there, but I like to give Alice Parker’s Folk Songs For Kids as a gift to young people.  I think they just love the drama and storytelling of it all. The same boy who “met” me to his class was fond of standing on tree stump in the snow while belting out Let it Go from the movie, Frozen. He had all the gestures down—you get the picture.  He will be on the stage one of these days!

Life is full of starts and stops, it’s always scary to start something new.  My character, Jaxon knows what needs to be done, he knows he cannot put off the inevitable forever, so he faces the day pragmatically; he learns the rules as he goes, and yes, he makes mistakes.  But most importantly, he endures and is rewarded with friendship.  But even if he hadn’t made a friend on that first day, it’s important to know that failure does not have to be the end of the story. We show up the next day and try again.

A librarian by avocation and an avid student of kid-speak, Martini has immersed herself in the wonder of children’s books and the excitement they create when kids discover a great story for the first time. Martini currently has two middle-grade books out, but this is her first picture book. She likes to say that she’s currently gathering wool to spin her next yarn for another great tale!

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Six years ago to the date, or November 23, 2014, I squirreled away a Washington Post newspaper article entitled, A GMO rescue for America’s iconic chestnut tree? By Tamar Haspel. Ms. Haspel was actually reviewing a book by Susan Freinkel called, American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree. What an odd coincidence that I should rediscover this story exactly six years later.  But then, maybe not.  It is fall, after all—the time when we start seeing chestnuts in the grocery stores or from vendors on city streets.  Maybe I just could not get them out of my head.

It was this article that inspired me to write Squirrels of Speedwell Farms, now in development.  It begins with the Great Chestnut Blight, which forms the background folklore for the story. Large and varied squirrel families, who have lived in the forest for generations are forced to emigrate when the chestnut forest becomes sickened with blight and the trees start to die off. In my research I learned how adept squirrels are at staying ahead of such catastrophe.  They actually do emigrate in mass, and can often accomplish great distances from the treetops when there are enough of them, causing the forest to shudder and shake under their vast numbers.

In my story, the squirrels end up settling in farmland surrounded by forests and are quite happy there. But before long the farmland is paved over, houses are built and the squirrels, rather than emigrate, simply adapt. That is how the story begins. In order to adapt to their changing surroundings, they will need to remember who they are and find strength and courage in the lore that has been handed down to them for generations.

But back to the American Chestnut: this much-loved tree, so much a part of life in the eastern and northeastern Americas, developed a spore sickness around 1904 and all but disappeared. No more yummy, highly nutritious nuts for humans, animals, and livestock, or wood for furniture and houses, or konkers for games. Not to mention its medicinal properties that the natives used. That’s a big claim: food, shelter, medicine and entertainment all in one tree. Adding to that, you could even call it a money tree; people would return to the forest year after year to collect the nuts to sell. A tradition and a way of life evaporated with these majestic trees—three to four billion of them! It’s hard to imagine how this continent looked with its pristine forests, but the American Chestnut was a prominent and much-needed presence among them.

It is comforting to think that the chestnut was on the menu when pilgrims sat down to dine and give thanks with the Wampanoag Indians, considering how close they came to starvation after their first year. Despite all their difficulty in finding and starting subsistence crops, discovering the forests knee-deep in food surely brought another pilgrimage to their mind when God sent manna from heaven. This straight-grained, hardwood tree was nearly one hundred feet tall, and often ten to twelve feet in diameter. Prolific and fast growing, it began producing nuts at seven or eight years old, and one tree could produce as much as one thousand pounds in one year and live anywhere from two to eight hundred years. That’s a lot of food!

There are currently nine species of chestnuts in the northern hemisphere, but the most common are the European, Chinese, Japanese, and American.  A self-fertilizing tree, the leaves contain nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, insuring a constant supply of these nutrients in the soil. In the spring the catkins (tree flowers) form on the trees and look like great clouds. Then as now, they are a favorite of honeybees and other pollen-loving insects.

It seems hyperbolic to say the chestnut tree has been around for 50 million years, but its discovery (in many places on the earth) through various excavations proves its presence for the last tens of thousands at least, by some estimates. If it was beleaguered by climate or catastrophe it resolutely marched off in a different direction. So it bogles the mind that a tree so able and ready to adapt could be so stymied by a little sickness.

The spore that infected The American Chestnut was brought over with an imported Asian chestnut tree in the late eighteen hundreds, and at a time when the hazard of such things was not understood. Within fifty years, the American variety was devastated. This new tree was smaller and could not come close to producing the quantity of nuts that one American tree could generate in a year. Nor could it cover vast tracts of land claiming exclusivity and dominance. Sadly, the infecting spore still exists today, but it cannot live in the ground, so it doesn’t affect the root of the tree.  It simply kills the upper portion—everything above the infected area. It is possible to find the American Chestnuts growing in the forest, but it is extremely unlikely they will ever reach maturity because they soon fall victim to the same spore.

But take heart—many efforts have been underway to restore this tree since the mid 1940’s.  Natural selection was unsuccessful, and scientists tried breeding it with the Asian chestnut, but that alone was also ineffectual. But in the 1980’s and 90’s, using nascent GMO technology, they began to inject the tree embryo with a gene that was resistant to the spore. Initial efforts were a failure, and the first trees died within a few years, but through trial and error they are now finally beginning to see results. This is a very slow and painstaking process and will, no doubt, require a careful curating to keep the trees viable until they are strong enough to exist on their own once again. Cross breeding with Chinese chestnut and gene therapy will hopefully create the resistance this tree needs in order to make a comeback. Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will benefit from all these efforts, not to mention all the animal life that it will once again feed and support.

This history now becomes part of our own lore. Something to teach our children as Wize Mel taught Chister and his friends in Squirrels of Speedwell Farms: “Wize Mel reminded Chister that squirrels had a knack for surviving disaster, and that not only would they endure this mystery, but solve it, remedy the problem, and somehow use it for their own purpose to benefit all Squirreldom.” I think we can learn a lot from squirrels.