I read a wonderful little book last weekend called Buttons in the Back, by Elizabeth Kirtland. It's about a strange little girl named Gertrude, or "Ortrud". Some favorite quotes:
"My brothers say I look like two big eyes on the end of a stick. My face is little and brown and my legs are thin and long and they call me Ortrud. But I know I can't go on forever being Otrud! I'm sitting in the tree house- all by myself I'm sitting in the tree house in our orchard and I've got my catchup bottle right beside me. My stomach is shivering like the cottonwood leaves because I'm thinking hard about my future life as a circus rider. I've decided gold stars on pink tulle for my skirt, not blue tulle with silvery spangles. I've decided a white horse, not a black. This makes me know for sure that I can't go on forever being Ortrud. I hate it. My really name is Gertrude. I don't like it too. It's hard and flat, not blond and curly. It's like potato bugs in a bottle and not like fireflies in the sky."
"The smell in our kitchen the day before Christmas is beautiful. Hot mincemeat steaming in a kettle on the stove- all spicy- mixed with fresh dough smell. Rolls on the back of the stove- getting bigger and whiter like balloons. You watch to see them rise- and they don't. Then you look away for a while and look back- and they're bigger. On the window, partly open to help it cool, is a glass dish of cranberry jelly- clear red and glistening, with steam blowing in over it. Paradine is mixing a big crock of dressing that smells outdoory- like Mama's herb garden after a rain. The teakettle sings and sings. All at once it's summer- and me in the tree house, and bees humming in the orchard, and a hummingbird flying like crazy to keep from falling inside a trumpet vine flower. Orange and shaped like a funnel with a ruffle on it."
"Another thing that happened without me having an idea was Aurory Borey Alice. Mama likes everything that happens in the sky. She likes sunsets and moons and stars- thunder and lightning and rain. She told us once about a long haired star named Comet she saw. Just anything that happens in the sky, she likes it."
I think the book is out of print, but you could probably find a used copy somewhere.
