Missing May

by Cynthia Rylant

  And within minutes we were carrying whirligigs out the door.

  We used May’s tomato stakes and other bits of board we could find and we filled up May’s empty garden with Dreams and Thunderstorms and Fire and that bright white Spirit that was May herself. Then Cletus went inside the trailer and came out carrying the Reverend Young’s church handout.

  We stood there in May’s beloved and practical garden, and Cletus searched the handout for some good words to say to bless the whirligigs that now had a place to spin and fly and live.

  He read:

  “‘What is the true mission of spirit messages? To bring us consolation in the sorrows of life….’”

  Ob and I smiled at each other. And then a big wind came and set everything free.

  Cynthia Rylant grew up in a small town in West Virginia. As a child, she never planned to become a writer. She lived in a four-room house with her grandparents, who grew and hunted most of the family’s food. Cynthia’s town did not have a library, but she read comic books and Nancy Drew books, and spent a lot of time outside.

  After high school, Cynthia went to college in Charleston, West Virginia. There, in one of her English classes, she discovered that she loved books. After she graduated, Cynthia worked in the children’s department of a library. She had never read many of the books that children know and love — but she came to love them as an adult!

  Cynthia was inspired to write children’s books of her own. She began writing at home but didn’t tell anyone about her stories — she was too shy. Instead, she just sent them off to publishers in New York. About two months later, an editor responded. One of Cynthia’s stories, When I Was Young in the Mountains, was going to be published! Cynthia Rylant was on her way to becoming a popular, well-known children’s author.

  Cynthia continued to write while raising her son, Nathaniel, in Kent, Ohio. She has written over fifty acclaimed novels, chapter books, and picture books, including the Caldecott Honor Books When I Was Young in the Mountains, illustrated by Diane Goode, and The Relatives Came, illustrated by Stephen Gammell.

  Now Cynthia and her family live in Oregon, where she takes care of her pets, reads, writes, and enjoys life at home. “I don’t write every day,” she says. “In fact, I sometimes go months without writing anything. Then suddenly, I’ll ‘sense’ a book in my head. I sit down with pen and paper and the next thing I know I’ve got a story going, then the next thing I know I’ve finished it! (I’m a quick writer.)”

  Of Missing May, Cynthia Rylant says, “I’m not sure where this story came from. But I was raised in rural West Virginia and I knew a lot of characters like Ob and Cletus and May. I just felt I was writing about my own people.”

  West Virginia is a great state with an interesting past. Did you know …

  Until June 20, 1863, West Virginia was part of the state of Virginia. But during the Civil War, West Virginia became the 35th state in the union. It all started when the majority of Virginia delegates voted to secede from the union and become part of the Confederate States of America. The people in the western part of the state disagreed with the decision and decided to form a state of their own. President Abraham Lincoln signed a law allowing West Virginia to become a separate state, and it remains one today. The citizens of West Virginia still celebrate June 20th as a legal holiday, “West Virginia Day.” It is the only state to have been created by presidential proclamation!

  Ob, Summer, and Cletus visit the state capital of Charleston, but the capital of West Virginia hasn’t always been in Charleston. When West Virginia became a state in 1863, Wheeling was the capital. The capital was moved to Charleston in 1870, then back to Wheeling in 1875. In 1877, a vote was held to decide between Martinsburg, Charleston, and Clarksburg as state capital. The capital was moved back to Charleston again and, despite recurring protests, it has remained there.

  The West Virginia capitol building was completed in February 1932. It cost over nine million dollars to construct!

  West Virginia was the first state to have a sales tax (in 1921), free rural mail delivery (1896), and outdoor advertising (1908). The first steamboat was also launched in West Virginia, in 1787, and the town of Grafton, West Virginia, was the first place to observe Mother’s Day (1908). West Virginia even has claim to the first brick street in the world! It was laid in Charleston in 1870.

  Quick state facts:

  State animal: Black bear

  State bird: Cardinal

  State butterfly: Monarch butterfly

  State fish: Brook trout

  State flower: Rhododendron maximum, or “great laurel”

  State fruit: Golden Delicious apple

  State nickname: The Mountain State

  State motto: “Mountaineers Are Always Free.”

  Check out where Ob, Summer, and Cletus drove on their trip through West Virginia!

  In Missing May, Ob crafts detailed, beautiful whirligigs. You can make whirligigs of your own with a few simple supplies!

  What you’ll need:

  Sturdy construction paper or cardboard

  Scissors

  A sharpened pencil with a large eraser on the end

  A small paper clip

  2 small extra erasers

  Now, put it all together!

  Using the scissors, cut the construction paper in the shape of wings. The shape that works best looks like a long oval with points on the top and bottom, rather than rounded edges. Feel free to try out different shapes! Just make two wings that are the same shape and size.

  Unbend the paper clip and flatten it out into one straight wire. Carefully poke one end through the middle of the pencil eraser. Pull the paper clip through so that an even amount shows on each side of the eraser.

  Punch one end of the paper clip through the center of one construction paper wing, and slide the wing along the paper clip toward the eraser. Do the same with the other wing, on the other side of the paper clip.

  Now that you have one whirligig wing on each side of the eraser, it’s time to put those extra erasers to use! Push one end of the paper clip through one of the erasers, and move that eraser so that it’s next to the whirligig wing. Do the same with the other eraser, on the other side.

  Hold your whirligig up in the air, and watch the wings spin!

  You could also …

  Name your whirlgig, like Ob did with his. You can give it any kind of name you want. Be creative!

  Decorate your whirligig wings with markers, glitter, or anything else you can find.

  Decorate the pencil, too, if you want. Paint it, glue bright-colored paper on it, or wrap a pipe cleaner around it.

  May grew fresh, hearty vegetables in her garden. You can grow vegetables, too, or buy some at the store to make May’s delicious vegetable soup!

  What you’ll need:

  1 Tbsp olive oil

  1 Tbsp unsalted butter

  2 carrots, sliced 1⁄4" thick

  1 medium onion, chopped

  1 handful green beans, trimmed and halved

  8 button mushrooms, sliced

  4 cups chicken stock

  3 cups water

  6 potatoes, chopped

  1⁄4 cup parsley, chopped

  salt and pepper

  What you’ll do:

  Heat butter and oil on medium high in a big soup pot. Sauté carrots, onion, and green beans for about 4 minutes.

  Add mushrooms and cook for another 2 minutes. Add chicken stock and water, potatoes, and some salt and pepper.

  Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat, and cook at a gentle boil until the potatoes are tender. It should take about 15 minutes. Add parsley just before the potatoes are cooked.

  Season to taste, then serve.

  You can try growing vegetables or flowers of your own! It’s easy to plant seeds in your backyard, in a pot, or even in a Styrofoam cup. All you need is soil, seeds, water, and some patience. Read the instructions on the seed packet (or look in a gardening book in your local library) to find out how deep to p
lant your seeds and how much water to give them.

  While you’re waiting for those seeds to grow into plants, check out these wacky gardening facts!

  What does baseball have to do with gardening? The famous ballplayer Babe Ruth is said to have worn a cabbage leaf under his cap while he played the game. It kept him cool, and he changed it every other inning.

  Ever wonder how the daisy got its name? Since the yellow center looks like the sun, many people knew it as the “day’s eye.” After a while, it came to be called the “daisy!”

  New Jersey is responsible for producing more than 60% of the eggplant in the entire world!

  Wouldn’t it be nice to be as cool as a cucumber? The insides of cucumbers on the vine can be twenty degrees chillier than the air outside on a hot day.

  The rafflesia is the biggest flower in the world. It can grow to be up to three feet across!

  You may know that trees change carbon dioxide into oxygen. But did you know that a single tree can remove twenty-six pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in one year?

  You can eat each and every plant in Tomorrowland at Disneyland — they’re all edible!

  April is National Gardening Month — so get out there and grow!

  Cynthia Rylant won the 1993 Newbery Medal for Missing May. She delivered this acceptance speech at the annual meeting of the American Library Association in New Orleans on June 27, 1993.

  This is the biggest thank-you note I’ve ever had to write in my life. Believe it or not, I’ve never been much good with words when I’ve tried to express gratitude and, especially, love. It is as if my heart swells so big that it cuts off all the circulation to my brain, which shuts down just as I need to find a few good words. It is our spirits which understand love, not our minds, and our spirits, wisely, are never wordy. When you see that quiet owl swoop across your path in the woods at night, or those beautiful geese fly V-shaped over a dark lake in early morning, or your own little child lie soft and moist in innocent slumber, it is your spirit which leaves you mute at the sight of these things and which moves you to understand them only with your heart.

  Thus it is hard for me now to find words. On this momentous occasion when I am required to give a grand speech, I have been rendered nearly speechless.

  I need to issue thanks to people who have made my life so beautiful that I have been inspired to write beautiful stories.

  The first will be my mother, who managed, I don’t know how, never to belittle or condemn any opinion I ever held. And, believe me, I held some wild opinions growing up. She loved me without judgment and patiently re-adjusted as I came home on holidays sometimes a vegetarian, sometimes not, sometimes a Christian, sometimes not, sometimes married, sometimes not. I had a baby when I was young and broke, and she rescued me from those times I was only steps away from the welfare office. And not once, though she has had countless opportunities, has she ever said to me, “I told you so.”

  I was raised in an atmosphere of forgiveness, and this may be the finest gift God has given me on this earth. Knowing that I would be forgiven by my mother, my family, if I ever failed at anything I tried gave me the courage to be a writer, the courage to place my work in the world for judgment, and the courage to keep on trying to say something important in my books.

  I must thank my grandparents, who raised me for several years in Cool Ridge, West Virginia, until I was eight. There is no question in my mind that it was during those years that the writer in me was born. And though I don’t remember it, I am sure I had many conversations with the angels as I walked in those West Virginia mountains, and what they said to me I tried to remember and write down after I was grown. I don’t think I am the only person who spoke to angels as a child. I think probably most of us did. And whether we grew into writers, or painters, or teachers, or librarians, we kept that light inside us that was the evidence of God, and when we loved books like Charlotte’s Web, The Runaway Bunny, Frog and Toad Are Friends (all Harper), and even The Stupids Step Out (Houghton), it was because of all that angel light that had fallen on us as children.

  My grandparents gave me a small, warm, quiet house. They gave me faith in breakfast every morning and supper every night. They gave me a garden rich with the smell of carrots and potatoes and beans. They gave me the sacrifice of all their work on my behalf, and from them I learned steadfastness.

  I grew up reading comic books because there was no library in my town or in my school, and I did not enter a public library until I was in my twenties.

  When I was twenty-three, just out of college and desperate for a job, I went to the Cabell County Public Library in Huntington, West Virginia, and asked for a job as a clerk. I was hired and assigned to the children’s department.

  Having grown up reading comic books and the Nancy Drew books my mother bought for me at the dime store, I did not know there was any such thing as children’s literature. I had majored in English in college, and still I did not know this.

  I spent only five months working in that children’s room—I was, myself, growing my own baby, who would be delivered in the oranges and reds of the fall. In those few months in that treasure chest of children’s books, I discovered what I was.

  I was a children’s book writer.

  I also learned many things about libraries those months that I have never forgotten. The most important thing I learned is that they are free. That any child from any kind of house in any kind of neighborhood in this whole vast country may walk into a building which has a room full of books meant just for him and may choose whichever ones he wants to read and may take them home because they are free. And they are not free in a way which might diminish the child, not in the way of second-hand clothes or Salvation Army Christmas toys.

  They are free in the most democratic and humane way. Both the poor child and the wealthy child are privileged with free libraries, and whenever they enter one, Make Way for Ducklings (Viking) will be sitting there waiting for them both.

  When I discovered I was a children’s book writer, I began writing stories at home and mailing them to publishing houses in New York City. I was still living in West Virginia, had never met an author or illustrator, had only just found children’s literature myself, and had not the foggiest idea how people became published. But I bought a copy of a book which listed publishers’ addresses, and I mailed my stories to New York anyway. Because that’s what I was put here on earth to do in 1978.

  And that year I received two more gifts from God.

  One, the most important, was my son, whom I named Nathaniel after one of my favorite writers. And that spirit in me which had been a little too quiet was stirred by this young child, and I found in this stirring my strong writer’s voice. It sounded like this:

  When I was young in the mountains, Grandfather came home in the evening covered with the black dust of a coal mine. Only his lips were clean, and he used them to kiss the top of my head.

  And it was this voice, this writing, which led to the second gift of that year. The acceptance of my first book for children and new meaning for my life.

  Writers, especially new ones, need editors, and the newer the writer, the more desperate that need.

  God gave me a third gift: He gave me Richard Jackson.

  I am not sure I would have written more than a few books in my life had I not been blessed with Dick Jackson on my maiden voyage. It is hard to believe you are worth much as a writer when you first start out, and if there’s no one there convincing you otherwise, no one there waiting in hopeful anticipation of your next work, then it is hard to keep writing. You can talk yourself out of it and go work in a bank instead.

  Perhaps most people think editors are simply the ones who fix the cracks and crevices in a writer’s book until it is fit to be published. I certainly thought that, before finding Dick.

  But I know better now. I know what it is that editors need to give and must give to the new writers who feel small and ungifted in this big corporate machine called publish
ing.

  Editors must give love, first and foremost. It is love which guides all our best work, which makes anything on this planet permanent. Without it, whatever is born, whether a child or a book, will be unable to shine.

  Dick Jackson loved me. He has loved many writers and artists, and his love for their talent and their struggle and their innocence has given the world beautiful books like The Slave Dancer and Dog Song (both Bradbury), and this love has made us all better.

  We have had God’s angels among us, and though we no longer see some of them, they are with us still. James Marshall, Arnold Lobel, Dr. Seuss, Margaret Wise Brown: they gave us art that lifted us and reminded us of the light from which we came and toward which we are returning. They worked, always, in love.

  I have many friends here tonight: fellow writers, illustrators, editors, librarians. I have my most dear ones here—my best friend, Diane; my sweetheart, Dav; my son, Nate; and my mother, Lee—who make my life safe and who make it worth living.

  Outside this room, we all have the stars. We have squirrels in the trees and whales sublime in the oceans. We have birds which will leave us in winter and which will return to us in spring. And flowers promising to do the same. We have wet rain, white snow, and always the sky. We have the universe.

  I want to thank the Newbery Committee of 1993, the American Library Association, all children’s booksellers, all children’s book publishers, all children’s librarians. I am honored to have been a part of you this past decade, and I cannot wait to see all of the beautiful books which are waiting for us in the future—which wait for the poor child and the wealthy child. And which will be given to them with love.

  Thank you, and God bless you all.

  Praise for

  CYNTHIA RYLANT’S

  Missing May

  A gifted writer returns to one of her favorite themes — love — in this case, as it can inform and transform grief. After her mother’s death, Summer was handed from one unwilling relative to another, “treated like a homework assignment somebody was always having to do.” At six, she was taken in by an elderly uncle and aunt. Ob had a game leg (WW II) and enjoyed creating unusual whirligigs; May liked gardening behind their West Virginia trailer. They loved each other with a deep and abiding love, wholeheartedly including Summer. Now, six years later, May has died. In a poetic, ruminative narrative, Summer recounts Ob’s mounting depression, his growing conviction that May is still present, and their expedition to find “Miriam B. Young: Small Medium at Large.” Meanwhile, they’ve been befriended by Cletus, an odd, bright boy in Summer’s class; she doesn’t especially value his company, but is intrigued by his vocabulary (“surreal”; “Renaissance Man”) and his offhand characterization of her as a writer. Rylant reveals a great deal about her four characters, deftly dropping telling details from the past into her quiet story — including a glimpse of Summer, as seen by a girl in her class, “Like some sad welfare case,” a description the reader who has read her thoughts will know to be gloriously untrue. A beautifully written, life-affirming book.