![]() ![]() Gerda’s quest to rescue her friend Kay from the Snow Queen’s palace spoke to my desire to get my mother back. “The Snow Queen” was the one I returned to again and again. “Thumbelina,” “The Princess and the Pea,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “The Ugly Duckling,”“The Little Mermaid,” “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” “The Little Match Girl,” “The Red Shoes.” Some of these tales were already familiar others I encountered for the first time. ![]() Paging through it, I recognize all of Andersen’s best-known stories. I still have the fairy tale book with my aunt’s inscription: To Lisa-Jo with love, Aunt Clem. Periodically she’d call to fill us in on her doings at some point she divorced Dad, married a truck driver she met in Haight-Ashbury, and moved with him to Arkansas. Earlier that year, my mother, a manic-depressive, had stopped taking her lithium and headed out to San Francisco, leaving my sister, our father, and me behind in Philadelphia. I was eight when I read “The Snow Queen” in a collection of Andersen’s fairy tales, a birthday gift from my Aunt Clementine in 1963. Hans Christian Andersen, “The Snow Queen” ![]()
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