The Painted Chest

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

In a small village in a strange rural land, villagers go daily to tend
their small plots of corn, barley, cabbages, and potatoes. Their lives
are bounded by this toil, which leaves them no energy even to notice the
wildflowers they pass on their way to the fields. “In the endless
cycle of plowing, planting, and harvesting, the villagers [work] from
dawn to dusk.” They can fill their stomachs but not their minds or
spirits.

Young Maddie has known nothing but this struggle for survival.
Sometimes she takes vegetables to Geordie, the oldest of all the
villagers. He tells her of a great famine that struck the area years
before and changed their lives.

The discovery of a small wooden chest with a rusty lock interests the
villagers briefly, but the chest is discarded when it is found to
contain only “oddly shaped objects of metal, wood and string, and many
pairs of strange, flimsy shoes.” Only Maddie, helped by other
children, pursues the mystery, discovers the musical instruments, and
enchants the villagers with their sounds so that they recover their lost
joy.

This imaginative tale for young children speaks to the heart and
imagination. Mills’s fable teaches children that they cannot live by
bread alone. Her colorful illustrations are magical, as befits her
parable of our need to nourish both spirit and body. Highly recommended.