Books I Have Loved

Title: The Open Gate
Author: Kate Seredy
First Read: Rhode Island College library
When: 1975 or thereabouts

My favorite place at RIC was a little carrel upstairs on the second floor wedged in between the metal stacks. I would go there to work on homework between classes, but soon noticed that the books that surrounded me were children's books, presumably for the education courses taken by future teachers. They appeared to be the usual collection of elementary-school library books, from Eleanor Estes to Sydney Taylor, until I came to a book I'd never heard of before, The Open Gate.

Now, I had met its author many years earlier at Stadium School, with her classic books The Good Master (a Newbery Award winner about young Kate, sent to live on the Hungarian plains) and The Singing Tree (the sequel, taking place during World War I; I was astonished when I realized Jancsi and Kate were the enemy because they were Hungarians, which, of course, is the whole point of the book, that behind all those armies are people who are alike all over). Even better, in junior high I had fallen in love with her Chestry Oak, the story of a wealthy Hungarian boy growing up under the specter of Nazism. The story of Prince Michael and the beautiful stallion Midnight resonates in me still today.

But this book...oh, what a lovely, funny, inspiring book. It's the story of the Preston family: father John, mother Molly, 12-year-old Dick, and 8-year-old Janet, plus John's mother, "Gran," who live in a New York apartment. The family enjoys their comfortable life, but Gran is bored and irritated by modern appliances and machinery. John is fired from his ad agency position in favor of his boss' son-in-law, and the family heads off to a lake resort to relax a bit before he takes up job-hunting duties. In a series of events instigated by Gran, John ends up buying a rundown farm, and when he realizes it, intends to sell it. But Gran wishes to stay there with "a stove that takes orders from the cook and not the other way around" because she was born on a farm and misses the life, and the kids want to stick around to see what happens. Gradually the whole family comes to love the hard work of farm life, and make fast friends, including the Van Keurans, an elderly couple raising their grandson, and Mike Mogor, a Polish immigrant.

Seredy has always glorified country living, from the big Nagy estate of Good Master and Singing Tree, to the small American farmer in Chestry Oak. But Open Gate distills this all in a big beautiful lovefest with rural living: the father who accepts hard physical work after positions in offices all his life, the mother who didn't want to help an aunt with the canning and ends up doing it all herself (and gets over fears of livestock), the two kids who bloom not just physically but in fellowship with young Andy Van Keuran. You sit there and marvel at Gran doing the cooking in a woodstove, John digging postholes, Molly redoing the furniture, the children taking care of chickens, cows, and chores that sound hard, hard, hard, but they are so happy at their fate you want to pack up and move to a farm and do without modern conveniences, too!

The book takes you and wraps you in warm, homey family values from the first chapters on the farm to the last. Andy's secret talent brings a very special reward to his family, Dick and Janet learn hard work and neighborliness bring great emotional satisfaction, Gran and Molly make a warm and welcoming home for all, and John discovers that working for himself is the best reward of life. Suppers around the wood stove, a Christmas tree with candles, being present at the birth of a calf, a ride home from an auction in a surrey on a summer night—it all insulates so well than when the crisis comes along, you know the family can weather the coming storm.

Yeah, it's old fashioned and slightly jingoistic, but by love of them all I am drawn into their family and we are all one.