All the Places to Love is a quiet celebration of the particular. Written by Patricia MacLachlan, the work is an ode to the prairie, family, and, of course, place and particularity. The story follows a little boy, Eli, as he comes to know the family farm and the places best loved by his father, mother, grandmother, and grandfather.
There is a sense of the calm predictability of family rituals when Eli is born and his grandmother swaddled him “in a blanket made from the wool of her sheep.” Place and people are intertwined from the beginning of the story as the newborn Eli is held up to the open window and he sees the places beloved by his family: “The valley, / The river falling down over rocks, / The hilltop where the blueberries grew.”
The story then follows the early years of Eli’s childhood as he explores with each family member and on his own, coming to love each place, such as the place across the river where the woods began, “Where bunchberry grew under the pine-needle path / And trillium bloomed.”
The exultant specificity brings life to each place. Each person who loves a place, whether Eli’s father or grandmother, brings a unique perspective to the cherished family farm and surrounding wild. The plants, enumerated with such care, bring seasons and life to the description. The animals, too, define the spaces, as when Eli discovers “Under the beech tree was a soft, rounded bed / where a deer had slept. / The bed was warm when I touched it.”
The story comes full circle with the birth of Eli’s sister, Sylvie. The rituals repeat with the baby wrapped in a wool blanket and Eli’s grandfather carving the baby’s name in the barn. Love, which is always years to be taught and shared, continues with Eli leading Sylvie into the places he has come to know.
Published in 1994, the story is a reassuring anchor to generations uprooted, divorced, and displaced. The idea of a family farm to come back to, predictable habits of life to rely upon, is inviting. Yet, the family and their environment do not feel suffocating and the outside world is remote but not shut out. Eli’s grandfather “once lived in the city, / And once he lived by the sea.” The barn is the place he has come to love most, but it is not for lack of experiencing others.
Eli, whose identity comes so strongly from these particular roots, also contemplates the outside world. As his sister enters into the world, he considers living one day in the city or by the sea. For now, he has the people and places to care for right in front of him, saying, “I will carry Sylvie on my shoulders through the fields…All the places to love are here, I’ll tell her, / no matter where you may live.”
The illustrator, Mike Wimmer, provides paintings well paired with the text. Rich in details that enhance quotidian scenes, Wimmer’s work offers enough visual interest to meet the detail-heavy verse of Eli’s story. His style is not come to without intention. He says it is the very goal of his work; “The details help tell the story.”
MacLachlan, née Pritzkau, was born in Wyoming and defines herself as a product of the prairie and carries a bag of prairie dirt with her to “remind her of what she knew first.”
MacLachlan left her beloved prairie, ostensibly to settle in Massachusetts with her husband, Robert MacLachlan. The MacLachlans appear to have been a family of glorious and beloved particulars: avid gardeners, ornithologists, readers, and devoted grandparents. Robert MacLachlan passed away in 2015.
Patricia MacLachlan’s fascination with place was far from a one-off. She wrote, “One thing I’ve learned with age and parenting is that life comes in circles. Recently, I was having a bad time writing. I felt disconnected. I had moved to a new home and didn’t feel grounded. The house, the land was unfamiliar to me. There was no garden yet. Why had I sold my old comfortable 1793 home? The one with the snakes in the basement, mice everywhere, no closets. I would miss the cold winter air that came in through the electrical sockets.”
In this disgruntled state of mind, MacLachlan grumbled about going to speak to a class of fourth graders about her work. Yet, once she met with the schoolchildren, their conversation took shape with ease. She described the scene: “Should I be surprised that what usually happens did so? We began to talk about place, our living landscapes. And I showed them my little bag of prairie dirt from where I was born. Quite simply, we never got off the subject of place. Should I have been so surprised that these young children were so concerned with place, or with the lack of it, their displacement? Five children were foster children, disconnected from their homes. One little boy’s house had burned down, everything gone. ‘Photographs, too,’ he said sadly. Another told me that he was moving the next day to place he’d never been. I turned and saw the librarian, tears coming down her face.”
All the Places to Love is a simple book that grounds love properly in the particular. What Eli experiences is the yearning of every human heart: to be known and loved. From this firm foundation, a child can grow to go anywhere secure in the knowledge that the places to love will still be there.
