I could tell it was part of her process for working out what this was all about. She asked to take a picture of the dead bird with my iPhone. If there was a spirit, where exactly was Oma purporting it might be hanging out? She wanted answers, not abstraction. “Like over there?” Maya asked, pointing to the tall grasses just north of where we were huddled around the lifeless bird. “Some people think animals have spirits that can move outside of their bodies,” Oma tried to explain. When her Oma (grandmother) and I stumbled over our words, she wouldn’t move on. She squatted nearby, staring, for minute after minute after minute and demanded to know what happened. My two-year-old daughter Maya found a dead bird on the beach and became completely transfixed by it. You know, the ones we tell that we think somehow kids won’t interrogate even though we have every shred of evidence that they are intuitive sleuths from day frickin’ one. Higginbotham, for example, warns her tiny readers: Thumbing through it, I was once again reminded of how dumb we are at a grief in this country, generally speaking, and how much we have to learn from even the most basic instincts of children. It’s a beautiful assemblage of a book - as if Romare Bearden himself rose from the dead and created a sequel to Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Or so says Anastasia Higginbotham, the author and illustrator of a new book for kids with that title.
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