Good morning Everyone!
From Amazon.com - The Book Cover
I was driving Kayla to school last week, when suddenly she asked me if I had ever heard of a book called My Side of the Mountain. I told her “no” at first, but then after she described it for a minute or two, I realized that I had read it in elementary school (lo these many years ago) and that it had been one of my favorite books. She really liked it too, so she and I had the fun of discussing a favorite book together.
An overview of the Catskill Mountains from en.wikipedia.org
Of course, she was much more familiar with it than I was, having read it the prior week, while it had been at least 37 years since I read it, but still I remembered a good portion of it. In the book, a young boy (I don’t remember his age, but he is either a tween or in his early teens) runs away from home to go live in the wild in the Catskill Mountains. He makes a home for himself – in a large tree, if I remember correctly – and has a pet falcon and gets to know many of the animals in the area, as well as having some incredible adventures. He manages to stay there about 2 years before he finally is discovered by the public and then decides to go home.
While he is in the wild, he meets a hiker one day who has gotten lost. The hiker is an English professor, who gives the boy a nickname. Kayla told me that the nickname was “Thorough” and then got very thoughtful. She added, after a minute, “I think it was because the boy cooked his food so thoroughly.”
A photograph of Henry David Thoreau
After a hasty cough on my part to help swallow a laugh, I gently suggested that perhaps she had heard the word wrong, and the nickname was in fact “Thoreau,” based upon the Thoreau who lived in a cabin on a pond in Massachusetts.
A photograph of Walden Pond, from a post by Mike Dash on blogs.forteana.org
She said, “Well, maybe so.” Then she brightened up and added, ” But at least that wasn’t on the test!”
Have a great day everyone!
Nancy
Tales from the Mom-Side 