Spring Has Arrived on the Palouse

Spring has arrived on the Palouse. Yellow and purple crocuses dot my front yard and blooming daffodils are but a couple of mornings away.  The daylight hours linger just a bit longer each evening and I for one am celebrating and remembering.

For me there has always been something quite magical about this particular season.  So many memories stand out as I reflect on the spring times of my childhood in rural Illinois.  But as a country kid, there was one thing that heralded the official arrival of spring like nothing else - the handwritten sign hanging in the local feed store window that said, “Chicks are here.”  Warmed boxes of the little peeping fluffy balls meant the earth’s axis had shifted ever so slightly and a new season was upon us at last. And although we had our own hens, each year my family placed an order for dozens of the little birds to join our feathery menagerie.
 
As a savvy farm kid, I knew those little gossamer sprites would grow at an amazing rate and most of them would eventually take the predictable route from our coop to our dinner plates. But that didn’t stop me from adopting one or two as my very own, assigning them names and then proceeding to be an enthusiastic mother hen to my own brood of little chicks.
 
Spring after spring those feathery-teachers-in-a-box provided me with many a life lesson: where there are chicks, there are odors (really bad ones!), along with nonstop noises, countless episodes of spilled water and constant acrobatic twists and tumbles.  And those same boxes of chicks provided me with my first real awareness about the fragility of life.  So many chicks.  So many lessons.
 
Eventually I left the farm and the chicks.  I took a number of back country roads and interstate highways before heading west to call the Palouse my home.  My family now considers me a city girl, but I’m still country, through and through.  So, it’s no wonder my heart beat with nostalgic delight to recently see a local sign that said “chicks are in”!  And even though I won’t be setting up a box for the peepers in my kitchen as my mom did so many spring times ago, I will go and take a look (and smell!) for myself.  And as I stand beside those boxes of fluffy down peepers, I will put on my children’s librarian hat and invite my fellow Pullmanites to come to Neill Public Library for a lovely “chick story” of its own.
 
This wonderful story, like so many others, can be found on the pages in a children’s book.  Author Michael Tunnel and illustrator Ted Rand collaborated on this particular gem, Mailing May. I invite you to come to the library’s Heritage Addition and take in the beauty of two of Rand’s original works of art from this charming regional story that takes place in the early 1900s.  It includes the Lewiston train depot and a little girl who gets “mailed” to her grandma.  So, if you’re now wondering what this all has to do with a box of chicks, there’s only one way to find out.  Come get the book and read it for yourself.  Or even better, share it with a little “chick” of your own who’s perched on your lap.  Here a chick, there a story, everywhere a chick and a story!  Read on!  Peep! Peep!  Spring has arrived on the Palouse.

Kathleen Ahern

Children’s Librarian