The Black Dog by Levi Pinfold is a story that has stuck to my ribs like peanut butter. I am drawn toward illustration and image that blends real with absurd, honesty with fantasy. Pinfolds work is just odd enough to bring me beyond the end of my nose, helping me see more with my heart.
This is a classic tale of Fear, with a capital F, and the beautiful small amount of hope and courage it takes to tame Fear, to make friends with it. The story starts with a father seeing a black dog as large as a tiger and calling the police who laugh at his claims. This part of the story feels gutturally true. How many times have I as a child or an adult expressed my fears, my anxieties only to have the one I trusted wave it off and explain it away. The Black dog grows.
The mother sees him next, even bigger. She runs and tells the father and they don kitchen armour and hide. Then oldest daughter sees the black dog the size of a T-rex! Finally the brother sees him as the size of a ‘Jeffrey’! We are left to image what the lad might be actually comparing it to. Fear is often surrounded by absurdity whether of our own making or not. I have quite a few ‘Jeffrey’s’ too, though they are not by the same name. He runs to his families hiding spot. Everyone has run and armed themselves expect for the youngest, Small. She has been pulled about and not yet made her choice. 
Small something that her family have forgotten in their fear and flight. She is still able to play. And so Small puts on her winter gear of bright yellow, reminding me of buttercups, rain coats splashing in puddles and rubber duckies in the bath. Small goes outside and simply states ‘Golly, you’re big.’ After pronouncing her truth she invites the massively monstrous dog to play, to follow and eat her if he can. Small knows the danger of her endeavor and she plunges merrily into it with songs and a game of ‘catch me if you can’. 
After a wild romp they return to the house and Small clambers in through the pet flap, the black dog, just her size now, can follow her in. She catches the dog under a laundry basket and presents it to her family. The story ends with the Hope family all gathered around a fire and Small Hope snuggling the black dog. We are left with an idea that Small Hope and a little play was all that was needed to make something monstrous into something wanted. She found room for the black dog and in so doing made space for so much goodness and love.
This story has stuck with me, reminding me when grief and fear threaten to grow larger than I can image facing, when I feel protected only by the scraps of a controlled life I can wear like a kitchen colander, when those I ask for help from dismiss my monstrous emotion, that at these moments I know a Small Hope in my heart house who is ready to open the door with courage and play. My Small Hope will bring my fear and grief back inside ready to share a plate of something good, ready to make room for the parts of me I try to keep shut out. It is only when I welcome in my grief, my fear, my big unwieldy emotions that I make space peace and the fire of kindness to be lit in my hearth.
With or without kids this is a book I will read on a regular basis, to remember.
Her relationship with her mother changes here too from one of trust and freedom to one of fear with boundaries. Hilda has no real experience with a cityscape and her mother is frighten because she does. Her mother gives off the impression the city is far more dangerous than the wild and is unwilling to allow Hilda to explore as she is used too. Hilda does not like feeling caged up and in her magnetic fashion is drawn toward the fantasic.
Hilda witnesses her new school friends throwing rocks at a tree full of birds and realizes too late the purpose of the game is to bring one down. Hilda doesn’t hesitate to leave the new friends to care for the injured bird. I feel this is a moment in my bones. I know there have been times in my own life where I watched something wrong unfold and I unlike Hilda kept quiet and tried not to be noticed. Hilda runs unashamed towards the hurt pointing out the harm done. She is unabashedly herself.
Hilda and her mother both realize that they need each other more then they thought. They see that being there for each other is what really matters. Sometimes it takes a bird’s eye view to see what I really want, what I really need.
In my experience a good story can be 1000’s of pages long (Harry Potter by JK Rowling) or less then 10. Sometimes words are not even needed and sometimes just the right ones. Neil Gaiman once said in an 
The heroine has a free heart and curious mind. She knows love and safety. But then she finds the favored chair empty. What does she do with the pain of separation, with her sorrow? She bottles it up of course, to keep it safe. A message in a bottle, so to speak.
“The bottle couldn’t be broken. It just bounced and bounced … right down to the sea. But there, it occurred to someone smaller and still curious about the world that she might know a way.”
A good story, one that makes my breath catch or asks me questions I do not know how to answer, has the opportunity to also give me words, pictures to help me retell my own story. For each of us has a story we are living, breathing and remembering. Sometimes I don’t want to tell my own story because it is too full of sorrow or trauma or I believe it too dull. And honestly it is easy to think I won’t have the same happy ending so many of the stories I love have. A life is filled with thousands of smaller stories that weave into one larger one. The smaller stories are easier to hold. However I have more difficulty seeing the big one. Still the more stories I read and allow to open my heart the more I feel compelled to hear my own bigger story. The more hope I have for my heroine too.
Center of Gravity 