By Alison McGhee
A mother holds her small child and, in a few spare lines, imagines the child's entire life ahead, learning to swim, growing up, having a child of their own, growing old, in the most tender goodbye-into-the-future a book can hold.
A mother rocks her little one and begins to imagine forward: one day you will run, one day you will walk in the door and shrug off your backpack, one day you will find yourself far away and homesick. She pictures her child dancing, sailing, standing under the stars, and then further, one day her child will hold a small weight against her own chest and rock it the way she is rocking now. The lines keep reaching, past the child's own children, out to the mother standing in this same room long after the child is grown and gone, remembering this exact moment. The words are few and slow, and Peter Reynolds's soft watercolors keep every page weightless even as the story travels a whole life in a handful of spreads.
Hand this to the child, or the class, at a real threshold, the end of a year, a moving-up, a goodbye, because it says the biggest possible version of what a send-off means: that someone loves you across your whole life, forward past everything you can't imagine yet, with the quiet ache that the person promising it won't see all of that life. For a child it lands as warm, safe, and lulling, more felt than fully understood. For the adult it's frankly moving. It's the tender heart of a send-off shelf: the book that looks a child's whole future in the eye and says, go, be all of it, I've got you.