Ox-Cart Man

A New Hampshire farmer spends a year gathering what his family has grown and made, wool spun into yarn, a birch broom, shingles split by hand, a keg of maple syrup, and when autumn comes he loads it all onto his ox cart and walks ten days to the market at Portsmouth. There he sells everything he brought, down to the cart itself and finally the ox that pulled it, and walks home with only a bag of coins and a few small things he has bought for his family, a knife, an embroidery needle, peppermint candy. Winter closes in, the family begins the whole cycle of growing, spinning, and building again, and by the next October there is another cart to load and another walk to make, the same journey repeating itself the way the seasons do.

Barbara Cooney paints the farm and the road to Portsmouth in a soft, muted folk art palette, flattened perspective and simplified shapes that recall New England primitive painting rather than a naturalistic landscape, letting the changing color of the fields carry the passage of a full year across the book's spreads. Donald Hall wrote the text as a poem well before Cooney illustrated it, and its plain, repetitive language, first this was sold, then this, then this, mirrors the steady, uncomplaining rhythm of the family's labor.

Read aloud, the book moves slowly and calmly, closer to a chant than a plotted story, and that pace suits four to eight year olds especially well at bedtime, since nothing in it startles or resolves so much as simply continues. Children often notice before adults do that the family ends the book with almost nothing, an empty cart and empty stalls, and that the story treats this not as loss but as the plain shape of a working year.