If Winter Comes, Can Spring Be Far Behind?: Old Bear by Kevin Henkes

By the time Old Bear fell asleep for the winter, it was snowing hard.

Soon he was dreaming.

And Old Bear's winter dreams are good. As he hibernates, he falls into a memory of his first spring as a cub, where he naps among flowers which seem as tall as trees. Then his reverie turns to a remembered summer day, with the sun like a yellow daisy, briefly obscured by clouds from which a rain of blueberries fall. Old Bear catches them upon his tongue like snowflakes as they fall.

Then his dreams turn to a mellow yellow, orange, and brown autumn, which suddenly yields to an icy winter night with a black sky lit by many colored stars. Old Bear sleeps and dreams, dreams and sleeps, until he wakens, feeling as if he's only slept for a short time.

But as he crawls out of his den, yawning and stretching, Old Bear blinks and blinks at what he sees:

When Old Bear walked out into the beautiful spring day, it took him a minute to realize that he wasn't dreaming.

In Kevin Henkes' just published Old Bear, the author's gentle, lyrical text simply celebrates the turning of the seasons, seen both through the outer eye and the inner eye of memory. In illustrative style and tone it is reminiscent of his Kitten's First Full Moon, winner of the Caldecott Award for illustration in 2005.