Charlotte Zolotow’s Over and Over: An Ode to IRL and Serendipity

Inside Cover of Over and Over by Charlotte Zolotow

Call them rabbit holes or internet time sucks or deep dives, the firehose of information and posts and reflections I scan before I even have my first cup of coffee can carry my day in so many directions. I’m a researcher, following scattered crumbs of info across the 50 tabs I have open at one time or the 37 windows on my phone and often it ends in the digital realm. Let’s trace one from Sunday, October 16th, 2022, that ended in the real world: 

1. I’m making coffee and scanning my personal IG feed as the 3-minute French Press timer ticks down and there is a post from @cdragonwagon, cookbook author and the daughter of Charlotte Zolotow, one of my all-time favorite kids’ book authors and editors. She expresses an appreciation for an illustration from one of her Mom’s books,1957’s Over and Over. I have many, many CZ books but have never heard of this one. Noted.

2. The illustration she posts is by Garth Williams, whose soft pencil drawings are, in my mind, inseparable from the Little House on the Prairie series ( I just found a whole boxed set of LHOTP at a thrift store and mostly bought them because I love the Garth Williams illustrations so much),  E.B. White books, and most special to me, the Frances books.

Here is the illustration she posted and wrote about:

From @cdragonwagon October 16th, 2022:

One of my all-time favorite illustrations, it’s from OVER AND OVER. The painting is by Garth Williams; the text, also by Charlotte, my late mother. In the book, a mother and daughter experience, each in her own way, the wonders of a year, and indeed, of time, cycles, and memory. It begins in December when the little girl who is the protagonist is filled with surprised wonder at the miraculous white-covered snowy world out her window.

But it’s this particular fall-centric illustration, the child gazing into the jack-o-lantern, which astonished me. And continues to do so. I remember poring over it when I was myself a child, trying to figure out and understand the light coming up from inside the pumpkin to illuminate the child’s face - how was it done, especially when you couldn’t even see the candle inside the jack-o’-lantern? This is my first memory of really studying, looking deeply at, puzzling over, a piece of art.

One reason why I feel picture books so open a child’s life, and change it, enlarge it: grow the powers of observation, curiosity, interpretation, sequential understanding. Although Garth‘s illustrations look a little old-fashioned and sentimental to today’s eyes, and certainly they are very very Caucasian and middle-class, the elements of seasonal change, times passage, holidays, and the ordinary miraculousness of daily life also make them universal.

There are dozens of illustrations I could say that about, imprinted on my retinas from the intense study I did, laying on my stomach in the shag carpet of my room and turning the pages of a picture book over and over, soaking it up. So upon reading this I think:

A CZ and GW collab that I don’t know about? Now I have to find the book Over and Over. I check Abe Books (though it disappointed me greatly to find they were owned by Amazon because independent resellers use it, they feel slightly more ethical to buy from than ThriftBooks) and find hardcover vintage copies for $10 plus shipping and put it in my cart. 

1. I get my coffee and think about it. Maybe instead of just buying a book off the strength of one posted image I should find it in a library first and decide if I HAVE to have it. Check my local library first, no dice. WorldCat next, find out that there is a copy at my alma mater PSU. Their library has been closed to “community members” for well, years now, because of Covid but checking their catalog I see with delight that Oregon library card holders are welcome again - but you have to sign in with the desk and get a day pass and I know I don’t have time for that in the next week. Okay. Copy of Over and Over stays in my Abe Books cart but I don’t press Purchase. 

2. We leave the house to get to a “pumpkin patch” held by a local glassblower Little Tomato Glass that closes in an hour on the other side of town. I had found him on IG via Mantel, a Kenton store I love, and bought a sky-blue glass pumpkin from him earlier in the week but now I wanted another one. We drive to Kenton and buy a celadon glass pumpkin.

3. After buying the pumpkin, it’s lunch time so we go to a reliable favorite pub Swift and Union because I checked their website and they have a bunch of Fresh Hop beers on tap and honestly, their fries are the best in town. We eat inside their restaurant for the first time since pre-Covid, it’s delightful. 

1. One of my favorite second-hand/consignment stores in Portland is across the street, Give or Take where I always have good luck. PDX is lousy with excellent secondhand stores, we are so lucky. I consider a few beautiful things in the kitchen area but in the kids’ area I find a Fisher Price Three Men in a Tub and I collect FP toys, so I pick it up. I glance over the small selection of kids’ books, maybe 20 in total. And there it is. OVER AND OVER. Right there, in front of my face, priced at $1.50. I bought it (and a really sweet Don Freeman titled Ski Pup that I’ll share later…)

Did I only notice it because I had been researching it that day? Would I have picked it up anyway because of the Zolotow/Williams on the spine? And, do I love it? 

I do, because it talks about the spinning of seasons, the repetition and rhythm and rhyme of the world through holidays that maybe we would see as too Judeo-Christian centered now, the eyes of a little girl that CD said might be too “sweetly caucasian” for today but still holds the bittersweet message at its heart that there is joy in familiarity, the way there is joy in discovery, in finding a book you didn’t know you had even been looking for.