OK, let me report to you on The Eskimo Twins. When I first started to reread it, I was reading as a cynical, feminist - the first chapter introduces the twins, Menie and Monnie, (Monnie is the girl) and to quote: "They would have thought it luckier still if Monnie had been a boy, too, because boys grow up to hunt and fish and help get food for the family." I snarled, "No wonder I have no self esteem, brought up in an Irish Catholic family, one of five daughters whose father used to say, "in China they drown baby girls" and then I had to read this garbage to reinforce my feminine worthlessness." Oh, I was hard on Lucy Fitch Perkins.

Then I started to read it for the story, so what if the women had to pull the dead bear back into town. So what...women have been cleaning up messes that men started forever and will be doing it forever. So what if the medicine man is a pain-in-the-ass that uses his power to control the villagers (there are only five families) and gets to keep the best pieces of the kills. He's so fat he gets stuck in the tunnel leading into Monnie's igloo. The kids know he's a phony..Menie says, to his mother, If the Angakok (medicine man, leader, whatever) can go anywhere he wants to, why couldn't he get out of the tunnel?" Like the kid exclaiming the Emperor has no clothes on, Menie wasn't taken in by the old liar. Maybe Lucy was telling us to question authority.

The story starts in the winter, dark all the time, then it becomes summer and the whole village climbs into the Woman Boats and goes to a green, grassy, flower filled valley, where the salmon are spawning. They pack everything they own into these boats (kind of like us going to Cape Cod) and set up tents there and fish and hunt and play for four months. Their lives are so simple, without night and day, they just call the passage of time "sleeps" - five sleeps ago this happened or two sleeps ago that happened. And the love and care they have for each other is heartwarming, each sharing what they have, each pulling his own load with an eye out for their neighbor at all times.

Back in their winter home, the mother tellls the children, "The Giants are always waiting before the igloo and we must work very hard to keep them outside" - and they know she doesn't really mean giants, she means the Hunger and Want are always waiting to seize the Eskimo who doesn't work all the time to provide for himself and his family. Now that's a lesson we have not learned or taken to heart. What's in it for me? How can I beat the system? Never heard or thought of from an Eskimo.

So, all in all, I am still happy with the Eskimo Twin book, maybe I even enjoyed it more than 60 years ago. And today, it even hit 34 degrees, first day above freezing - and you know what? it's even lighter earlier. Cape Cod here we come.