When I met Mabel at the cafe this morning she gave me a present. She had made me a book. On the bus ride to school she showed me each page and explained about it. I was so excited. As soon as I got back home I took Mabel's book out of my bag and put it on the table with the book dragons, who would hold it open for me to take pictures of.
The page above is a very large "equals" sign painted with glitter paint and outlined in marker. The pink circles below are four wheels escaping from a car.
Above are nine pink circles which are nine wheels escaping from a monster truck. Below is a page divided into eight segments. Four of the segments have pickles made of green glitter. Three segments have one pickle each and one segment has two pickles. The other segments have "plus" signs or "equals" signs in green marker. Reading this picture in a clockwise fashion starting at lower right – "1 pickle + 1 pickle + 1 pickle + 2 pickles = 5" – the numeral 5 is written in the very middle, in green marker.
I hope I have the rainbows straight. Mabel will correct me if I am wrong, but I believe she said the top rainbow was hers and the bottom rainbow was painted by her mother. Mabel also included one or two other paintings by her mother, but I did not take pictures of them. I did not photograph every page by any means, but I am glad I got the whole series below because it needs to be seen as a sequence for the full beauty of the individual drawings to emerge.
The back cover of the book is a collage on cardboard that both Mabel's parents worked on and that I worked on at one point, along with Mabel. Now it is part of the book. There is also a note, not bound into the book. I use it as the last picture because of the especially careful drawing of three things in a row – a flower, a ladybug, and a daddy long-legs. The ladybug has twelve legs and twenty-one spots.
