Changes, Changes: Winter Is Coming by Tony Johnston and Jim LaMarche

It's a cold September day.

Fall is still here, but I feel it.

Winter is coming.

The trees are still glowing with autumn colors, but the cool wind that ruffles the girl's hair beneath her red hoodie tells a different story. Things are changing.

As she sits quietly in her tree house in the woods with her drawing pencil and notebook, the girl realizes that the animals foresee the changes, too.

A red fox slips into the clearing.that I am watching.

First-sun hits hits his back, the fox shining like a small fire.

I am quiet, quiet.

The red fox sniffs the last apple. Wrinkled or not,

It's food, and winter is coming.

As the autumn passes and the girl returns to her post with notebook and binoculars, she sees other animals, a doe and her fawn snuffling through the leaves, a skunk whose scented calling card precedes him, and even a mother bear and her big cub scratching in the leafy litter for a stray nut and a lynx, like a "lynx of Egypt, eyes the color of the moon," ghosting quietly along behind the rabbits who have left off gnawing the dried weeds.

A woodpecker riddles the tree with holes.

Animals do not waste.

Winter is coming.

Noted author Tony Johnston's Winter Is Coming (Simon & Schuster, 2014) delineates the watcher in the woods through the changes of the fall months in lovely blank verse, while artist Jim LaMarche portrays the signs of earth's turning season, sometimes through the eyes of the girl, sometimes from a higher perspective, as we watch the girl watching the animals, and sometime from below, as we look up to see a flyover formation of Canada geese going south. LaMarche's nuanced gouache, ink, and pencil illustrations are perfectly married to Johnston's evocative prose so that the reader feels the wind, smells the woody leaves, and hears the quiet and the ruffles of the dying leaves as the animals pass below. Even if fall and winter are not favorites, they are part of the cycle of life, and Johnston and LaMarche portray that theme in perfect harmony. A glorious blend of writer and artist that captures the feeling of fall's moments in time.

Snow Time: First Snow in the Woods: A Photographic Fantasy by Carl Sams and Jean Stoick

The chipmunk is a know-it-all busybody.

"HEY, SPOTTY! YOU DON'T LOOK SO GOOD. YOU'RE LOSING YOUR SPOTS! BETTER START HIDING YOUR ACORNS!"

"WHY WOULD I WANT TO HIDE ACORNS?" WONDERED THE FAWN.

"ACORNS ARE EVERYWHERE."

But the chipmunk knows a secret. And indeed, it seems everyone else is in the know except the young deer. Something big is about to happen. The woolly bear caterpillar chomps his way hurriedly across a fern in the dewy morning. The monarch butterfly leaves for a faraway summer elsewhere. The green leaves change colors and float down, down, down, and the woodchuck has only one word for him: "Hibernate!" A change is coming, he seems to say. It will come when the dragonflies no longer fly. The little deer feels as if he's being abandoned by the only world he knows.

"WHY CAN'T EVERYTHING STAY THE SAME?"

It's a thought that crosses our human minds, too, as summer seems to flee from us all too soon, and the little deer has the same anxiety we all feel.

"BUT I'M NOT READY!"

But Mama is wise in the ways of the world. She knows that her baby is now big and strong, with a thick, new coat. And she knows just where to go when the snow begins to blow.

"YOU ARE READY FOR THE FIRST SNOW OF THE WINTER," SAYS MAMA DOE.
LISTEN TO YOUR HEARTSONG. FOLLOW ME."

Carl Sams' and Jean Stoick's lovely First Snow in the Woods: A Photographic Fantasy (Carl R. Sams Photography, 2007, 2010) chronicles the coming of winter, from the first liftoff of the brown owl and Canada geese for the southward journey to the first snowflake of winter, in a beautiful picture essay which personifies the enormous changes from high summer to windswept snowscape in elegant text and beautiful illustrative photos, a book which is a good readaloud for those classroom seasonal units as well as for quiet contemplation.

Sams' and Stoick's earlier best-selling photographic nature essays include Stranger in the Woods: A Photographic Fantasy (Nature) Winter Friends, and Lost in the Woods: A Photographic Fantasy (Connect-It).