Cycle of the Seasons: Birdsong by Julie Flett

It's a mucky morning as we pack up the last of our belongings and leave our little home in the city by the sea.

For a child, a move to a different place, leaving friends and relatives and her favorite tree in her window behind, is hard. Katharena doesn't even feel like unpacking her drawing things.

But it is spring, and the new little house is surrounded by early snowdrops all in bloom. Soon her mother sends her to meet their neighbor, an elderly woman named Agnes, who welcomes her and show her own clay pottery and sculptures and garden.

There are berries and flowers and so many of her clay things.

"Your mom says you love to draw," said Agnes.

As summer ripens into fall, Katherena and Agnes become fast friends. They prepare the garden for its winter rest, and Agnes says her bones are as creaky as the bare limbs of trees in the wind. She takes Katherena to her studio and shares the new pot she is making, and shares moon lore, and Katherena shares her Cree Indian name for the changing moon.

But as the geese fly away and autumn sinks into the cold of winter, Agnes is not well, and the girl and her mother make salmon soup and take it to her. And even as spring nears, Agnes has no strength to work her garden, or even to go outside to see summer's harbinger, the snowdrops in bloom. But she does have a last gift to give...

Agnes sends me home with a cup full of bulbs--snowdrop bulbs to plant in the field next autumn.

This is a winter's tale, a gentle story that deals with the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of life as well, Julie Flett's Birdsong (Greystone Books, 2019) chronicles an unlikely friendship of age and youth and the time that that the two share. In Katherena's own words, the narrative is lovely but spare, powerful in what goes unsaid but not unrevealed in words, but revealed in artist Flett's striking illustrations, done in flat outlines against bright white pages, in a palette limited to blacks and browns, which speaks of the rhythms of the seasons and of the heart.

Life goes on in this meaningful book, published to raves from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, School Library Journal and Horn Book.