Next week, our first book in the Once Through A Garden Gate series will be available! What a long journey this has been, but well-worth it for all we have learned.

Yes, PeeP! is a catchy little title. Yes, it is about adorable chickens growing up and having fun adventures. Yes, there is a full-page illustration for every chapter. Yes, you can learn some interesting words in the Chicken language that might come in handy one day. But why should anyone read this book?

Perhaps one of the best reasons to read this book is for none of those reasons. It is an opportunity to think about and make sense of the world and the part of life we call friendships.

As the back cover says…“Life often sends the gifts we most need wrapped in friendships.”

Gracie has three major friendships with other chickens in PeeP! Here is how Gracie described two of those friendships just before Lefty had to move out to the country.

It took time for Gracie’s heart to mend after Lefty and the others moved out to the country, leaving only Bessie and herself. Finally, they were able to ask for new friends. But life did not give them the friends they wanted (They wanted more friends like Lefty and the others). Life gave them Blanche and Pearl. Blanche was fine, but there has never been a chicken like Pearl. Gracie’s friendship with Pearl was a different kind of friendship. It was based on a decision.

What Gracie did not realize was that Life had given her the friends she needed. Pearl would turn out to be an important friend who helps Gracie achieve something she could not have achieved otherwise.

Even though one entire section is titled “BuH-HuB?” which means “Why?” in the Chicken language, it does not answer that question. “Why?” is often the most difficult question to answer.

And the narrator does not give them any answers to “Why?” They will figure it out for themselves using their own “chicken wisdom.”

What follows is true, but it is not in PeeP! Nevertheless, this definitely influenced the story during rewriting.

For twenty years, I taught elementary school in an inner city system. Being a city with a naval base and next to several other large cities, the population was transient. But one year in the 1980’s, something different happened.

There was a new boy in my class who joined us a few weeks into September after the school year had already started. He was a fine-looking boy and very well-mannered. He was also very sociable. Although new, he fit right in with the other boys and was always chosen first when we played kickball at recess. Several girls secretly had crushes on him too.

We had a Halloween party that year at the end of the week. He brought Hawaiian Punch which came in big cans back then, not plastic jugs like now. And he also brought an opener for the two big Hawaiian Punch cans. (Just so you know, Hawaiian Punch was hugely popular back then, and everyone wanted some.) We all had a great time with lots of “Happy Trick Or Treat” wishes.

When I got to school the next Monday, the secretary in the office called me aside and told me that he would not be coming back. His father, an angry man who took his anger out on his family, had found where the boy and his mother had been living, and they had to leave in the middle of the night with only what they could carry. There was no way we at the school could reach them. No way we could help them.

But you don’t tell things like that to young children. You can only say that their friend had a family emergency and had to leave. You don’t say they left for fear of being hurt.

There are so many “Why?” questions in that one boy’s story that may never be answered. It was a very rare occurrence all of those many years ago, but times have changed.

Some of his friends in class told me about how they were handling the sadness they felt. Their words are incorporated into what you will read in a turning point near the end of PeeP! The only real difference is that Gracie and Bessie will say those words.

Hopefully during the short time he spent with us, we were “the gifts wrapped in friendships” that he needed the most during an all-too-short resting period in his young life.

I still have the can opener he left.

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