A Home for Arnold: Learning Belonging with an Acorn

After years of dreaming, drawing, planning, my first illustration project has launched. "A Home for Arnold" is written by my talented friend, Amy Jo Smith, a story of a little acorn, tumbling away from his mother oak to be found by a little girl, planted in a new home and nurtured in loving relationship.

This book deepened my appreciation of creative collaboration. While I worried it could be an impediment in a dear friendship, instead it deepened it. Amy Jo and I have had plenty of laughs, prayers, catch-ups as this project has taken shape. I’m grateful to be working with a friend who values relationship in each of the (many!) facets of this process.

As Amy Jo mentioned, sometimes you may write a book for other people, only to realize it’s actually for you. This seems to have been the case for me illustrating "A Home for Arnold", as I was transitioning between homes and putting down new roots.

Studying an Acorn

I began illustrating while I still lived in Toronto, picking up acorns, studying them in varied lighting and positions. In my little garet apartment I played with colour palettes, trying to choose the perfect Arnold hue, taking inspiration from my friend's daugher for the little girl's yellow-ochre jacket. And so these images grew in my imagination and from life, on scribbled trace paper sketches, a growing stack of painted watercolour paper that moved with me from Toronto to Hamilton.

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Much of Arnold's life to date has been on computer screens. Amy Jo and I have tweaked faces and nudged words this way and that, pondered the merits of serif fonts. I’ve read and reread proof copies to my nieces, finding our favourite pictures and moments in the story. And now it’s finally about to reach more hands, big and small, and take on its own life.

An artistic collaboration with my niece

Finding home and a sense of belonging in Hamilton has developed slowly over time, as relationships have grown. Relationship is at the heart of Arnold's story, the little girl who finds and loves him is the means of becoming rooted, planted. And that has certainly been the case for me here as I continue to deepen connections with neighbours and colleagues, friends from church and fellow artists.

I realized I identify with this place more than I’d admitted to myself, getting quite defensive as someone ridiculed Hamilton’s slow, cumbersome bureaucracy. I hadn’t known I had such loyalty to this messy, yet beautiful place. (But yes, the bureaucracy is slow…)

E.H. Shepard, the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh, roamed Ashdown forest outside London, as inspiration for the Hundred Acre Wood. I found my own oak grove on the shores of Lake Ontario, here in Hamilton, years after I drew and painted Arnold’s grove from my desk in Toronto. It took me by surprise one day on a walk, stopping to sit and looking up to see familiar oak leaves, then down to see a scattering of acorns.

My local oak grove

It was truly peaceful, a feeling of pause surrounded by trees that had been there far longer than I’ve been alive, and may outlive me. The sun was lighting a golden blaze of grass beyond the tree canopy. It’s a favourite spot to revisit, to sit, pray, muse, and a place that knits together my illustrating, and the place I now call home.

In the book's dedication, I included a verse that remains precious to me "...a longing fulfilled is a tree of life." (Proverbs 13:12). Journeying with Arnold between homes I have begun to see longings fulfilled, God's goodness in bringing me to Hamilton. Arnold became a tangible illustration of this. He showed me aspects of belonging that perhaps I'd known but forgotten - the nurture of friendships old and new, and roots growing deeper in a new, beautiful place.