calandrahunter

I wrapped up the Newbery Honor books of 2025 with Andrea L. Rogers’ Chooch Helped, which also won the Caldecott Medal this year for Rebecca Lee Kunz’s rich sunset-colored illustrations. It’s a picture book about a long-suffering older sister who watches as her two-year-old brother “helps” various family members complete their tasks, usually by accidentally making more tasks by spilling the flour, pulling up the newly planted garden vegetables, tearing out the stitches in a freshly sewn pucker-toe moccasin, etc.

The sister, standing in for older siblings everywhere, is exasperated. Although of course in the book she moves past that exasperation, once her parents point out that she’s one of her little brother’s most important teachers, I suspect that this book may not be a hit with older siblings. Why does no one ever validate their feeling that their younger siblings are so annoying!!!!

As a youngest sibling, however, I was enchanted, especially because this is exactly the stage my niece is in, although (knock on wood!) unlike Chooch, she’s usually not actively destructive when she “helps.” It just takes twice as long to get anything done when she’s “helping” water the plants or mix the pancake batter. But to an adult, it’s totally worth it to see her attempting to haul around a gallon or water or measure a teaspoon of baking soda.

(A side story: last week, as I was washing up the pancake dishes, she was trying to get a slice of orange onto her spoon. At last she announced, “I’m frustrated.” There is nothing cuter than a two-year-old using a ten-cent word, so of course I stopped to help her get that orange onto her spoon.)

The illustrations are just lovely, too. I love the sunset-hewed pallet, the way that the patterns on the characters’ clothes splash a little past their outlines, the Cherokee motifs that Kunz wove into the illustrations. There’s a particularly gorgeous illustration of Chooch gigging for crawdads with the friend of the family, both of them dark silhouettes against the orange water, and a pale gold moon with a glowing aureole of fireflies.

Recently I finished Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and have not yet been able to write about it, because I need time to digest it. But Kimmerer recently released a shorter companion book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, which is a distillation of certain ideas from Braiding Sweetgrass, and also easier to digest simply by virtue of being much shorter.

The Serviceberry’s basic idea is this: our current extractive industrial economies are rattling down the road straight toward ecological catastrophe. What other economic models could we follow instead?

And as a model, Kimmerer offers the serviceberry itself. As she notes, Western economics is founded on the idea of scarcity. But while scarcity is a condition that occurs in nature, it’s not a constant. In the natural world, abundance is just as common as scarcity. A serviceberry tree after a rainy spring has more than enough berries for birds and squirrels and humans.

Serviceberries are thus one model of a gift economy. They invite humans to understand “natural resources” not as a source to be exploited but as a gift from the earth, which like all gifts creates a reciprocal relationship between the giver and the receiver. We take, but also give. (In the case of the serviceberries, by spreading the seeds.)

And, furthermore, Kimmerer suggests, modern society could use traditional gift economies as a model for one possible way forward out of our current economic race toward climate catastrophe. There are already small-scale attempts in Little Free Libraries and free farm stands and Freecycle and the Buy Nothing movement, everything from the traditional mutual aid in churches to the new forms of digital gift economy exemplified in, for instance, fandom.

This last is not something Kimmerer discusses, but fandom is my own most extensive experience with a gift economy, where people write fic or draw fanart and post it with no expectation of direct payment behind perhaps a few comments - but also the more diffuse payment of helping create an environment where other people also post their fan creations for everyone to enjoy.

Now, at this point in my life, I’ve mostly moved over to selling stories for regular old money, because we have not (yet) learned how to leverage the gift economy so that it can pay for, let’s say, a two-month road trip. But, on the other hand, so many of the friends that I stayed with on that road trip were people I met through fandom, or through book reviews or nature photos on Dreamwidth or Livejournal. The road trip would not have been possible without the money, but it also would not have been possible without the web of relationships created by the gift economy.

***

While I was reading The Serviceberry, I discovered a couple of serviceberry trees on a street near my house, in a location that made it clear they had been planted by the city. Visions of serviceberry muffins dancing in my head, I went out to pick some berries - keeping a weather eye on the road, as picking berries from a public tree felt vaguely illicit.

But berry-picking is an absorbing occupation, and I didn’t notice the man walking his dog until he was almost upon me. “What are you doing?” he asked, curious, with some slight accent I didn’t recognize.

“Picking serviceberries,” I explained. “Would you like to try one?”

He would and he did. “It’s good,” he said, a little surprised. “Better than blueberries.”

And we said good evening, and I went back to picking serviceberries as he and his dog walked on.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A reread of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I had intended to reread Through the Looking-Glass, too, but to my distress I found that I no longer enjoyed the absurdism of the first book (maybe politics have imitated art a little too hard in this area recently?), so it seemed pointless to subject myself to the second as well.

Maybe I’ll give it another go in a decade or two and find that I’ve come back around to enjoying it again.

What I’m Reading Now

A little bit of this and a little bit of that, but nothing that merits a progress report right now. My attention has been mostly taken up with the exigencies of a plumbing crisis, alas.

What I Plan to Read Next

Still waiting for the library to bring me Evelina!