By Lane Smith
A boy walks through his great-grandfather's garden, where the hedges are clipped into the shapes of the old man's whole life, and he reads that life off the bushes as he goes.
A boy is walking through a garden full of enormous green shapes, all cut out of hedges. As he goes, the shapes tell a life one sentence at a time. Grandpa Green was born a long time ago on a farm. He had chickenpox, so one hedge is covered in spots. He wanted to study horticulture, but a war came, so he went and was a soldier. He met a girl in Paris and married her. They had children, then grandchildren, then a great-grandchild — the boy holding the watering can. Near the end the sentences change. Grandpa Green is very old now, and some things slip away from him. He forgets to water. He forgets his hat. He forgets names. But the garden, the boy says, remembers for him. On the last pages the boy gathers up the hat and the shears the old man has left lying around, and behind him a new green shape is starting to take form.
The whole life is told in pictures, not words, so a young child follows it like a treasure hunt: a green rabbit, a green dragon, a green wedding dress. Meanwhile you're reading the real story going on underneath. That gap is the point of the book. It's why a four-year-old and a nine-year-old take completely different things from the same pages, and why you'll get a third thing reading it aloud. It also gives a child a way to be around someone who's slipping. The boy isn't sad and isn't trying to fix anything. He picks up the hat, carries the shears, and quietly remembers what his great-grandfather can't, and he's plainly glad to do it.