In the great green room

There was a telephone

And a red balloon

And a picture of

The cow jumping over the moon

According to Bruce Handy in a (mostly) excellent book “Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult” to Margaret Wise Brown, “the very act of cataloguing a room held private meaning” as she once told a friend that she would combat depression every morning by looking around her apartment and making a note of the various things that gave her pleasure.

As any reader of this blog subtitled “collecting, observing, and cataloguing my world” will note, I most certainly do the same thing and while I hadn’t consciously realized it was to “combat depression” that does make sense.

Bruce Handy doesn’t directly credit the source of this fact as that isn’t how he uses footnotes. (1) But since I’ve read the excellent biography “Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon” by Leonard S. Marcus and don’t remember it, I think it must have come from the newer biography, “In the Great Green Room: the Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown” by Amy Gary. I hadn’t heard of this newer biography but can’t wait to read it.

(1) Bruce Handy uses footnotes to add information as he does on page 206 to explain why he hasn’t included “Anne of Green Gables” in his chapter “Going on Seventeen (Or Not)” and calls Anne a “sunny, cheerful, detestable orphan”.