Basket Moon by Mary Lyn Ray, illustrated by Barbara Cooney, 1999.

An eight-year-old boy lives in the countryside with his parents, and his father makes baskets to sell in the town of Hudson in New York. The boy has never been to town before, and he wants to go, but his father always says he’s too young.

His father has taught him which trees are best for wood to make baskets, and he watches his father and the other men who live in the area gathering it. He’s also watched his father weaving baskets, and he starts to weave baskets of his own. When he turns nine years old, his father decides that he’s old enough to go to town with him to sell the baskets.

They sell their baskets to a hardware store, and they buy some supplies their family needs. The boy marvels at all the new sights around him. However, as he and his father are heading home, a man teases them about being hillbillies who only know how to make baskets. The boy’s father ignores them, but the boy is bothered by what the man said.

For a time, the boy no longer wants to make baskets, thinking that it’s something that only hillbillies do, like the man in town said. However, when the boy kicks over stacks of his father’s baskets in anger, they don’t break when they fall, and he sees that his father makes strong, high quality baskets. His mother and one of the other men who works with the boy’s father talk to him about how they learned the art of basket making from the trees and the wind. The trees and the wind never seemed to talk to the boy before, but when he really listens, he begins to understand what the men mean.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I like books about traditional crafts and lesser-known pieces of history. In the back of this book, there’s an author’s note about the history of making baskets among the country people around Hudson, New York. Sometimes, these country people came into town to sell their baskets, but the townspeople were also somewhat leery of them. The wooded countryside around the town was spooky to the townspeople, and there were a lot of stories about frightening things that lurked there. The author points out that this is the area where the stories of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow were set. The time period of the story is indefinite although it looks like it might be set around the late 1800s or early 1900s. The author’s note says that the art of making baskets in the area started dying out in the mid-20th century because people were using different types of containers, such as paper bags, plastic containers, and cardboard boxes. However, the traditional baskets were made very study, and surviving examples of this functional folk art still exist in collections and museums.

One of the themes of book is being in touch with nature, which is what the adults in the story really mean when they talk about hearing the wind and the trees speak to them. In the end, the boy thinks he literally hears the wind calling to him, but I think it’s supposed to be a metaphor for him getting in touch with nature and with his craft. His family and the others around them are country-dwelling people, and some of the townspeople look down on them for living out in the countryside, away from the society, amenities, and business of the town, but the country-dwelling adults are comfortable with themselves and with their lives. They realize that they know things about nature and about their craft that the townspeople don’t know.

It did occur to me that the townspeople probably wouldn’t know how to make their own baskets if they had to do it themselves. We don’t think that much about baskets today, although we still use them sometimes, frequently as a form of decoration. In those days, though, the baskets were functional home necessities for carrying and storing food and other items. The townspeople in the story buy their baskets from these makers in the countryside because they are the ones who have necessary skills and knowledge to make strong, high-quality baskets that the people in the town need, whether or not the townspeople truly appreciate the work and skill that went into them. Part of what the author’s note points out is that the baskets were of such high quality that some of them have long out-lived their original makers and users. Things of quality last.