For Audrey, Arkansas 196X

My dream job, if you didn’t know, is to archive obscure children’s books. This will probably never happen, ever. Not even in an alternative universe. This is what dreams are for.

There was this children’s book I have remembered fondly from my childhood that I decided I must find again, a book passed down from one sister to another after it was given to the oldest in the mid-1960s. I’d searched for it online by title and author for months (Biquette, The White Goat by Francoise) and found nothing, until last week when I discovered it on ebay. I ordered it immediately.

By my memory this book was about a sick little girl who was ordered by her doctor to get a goat and drink goat’s milk daily until she was well, and the goat was a bad little goat that got into all sorts of trouble, including eating the little girl’s red sweater. I also remembered that the accompanying illustrations were clever, detailed, and meaningful to me. What I remembered best is the cover of the book. The book jacket was long gone, but the primary illustration was embossed on the cover, a little goat in profile, smiling, its leash trailing behind it, on a background of hunter green.

When it arrived, I found that my only memories of this book that were correct are few — it was translated from French, the little girl in the story was ordered to get a goat and drink it’s milk, and the cover of the book is indeed green. It is neither clever nor climactic, and the illustrations are dull.

But acquiring this book did one thing that makes the purchase worthwhile. I remember this viscerally: being a small girl alone in a quiet room, pulling a book off the shelf, and feeling the magic and awe at seeing a handwritten inscription to my biggest sister who was once a small girl, unable to imagine that she was ever a child, or that I would ever grow up.