Seven pips for Pippin

This story came about one evening in dreamy conversation with my daughter as she held her Pippin. Please feel free to print it and cut out the pictures and words (I have left space between to allow for this) and mount them on card adding some water colour washes around for softness and staple or sew the pages together to make a little book. If you need further detail as to how to do this let me know. The copies that I make are personalised with a photographed of a hand stitched Pippin on the front, if you decide to sew your own you might like to use a photograph of her, alternatively design the from cover as you wish or simply paint the story's title in water colours. 

The pips in the story are from hunza apricots which can be bought in health food stores and are very health and delicious.

I offer this story in good faith, do share it but please tell those you share it with where it came from. 

   

SEVEN PIPS FOR PIPPIN 

                                                                                              

It was a warm soft day in the garden, and a little girl had built herself a small house with an old velvet curtain, a sturdy chair and the help of the kind tree’s branches.

An orange brown gatekeeper butterfly flew in to visit and for her snack the little girl’s mummy had given her a bowl of special dried apricots that still had their pips in.

She ate a sweet wrinkly apricot slowly and smiled when she came to the tiny pip inside. She turned the pip over and over with her tongue, clinking it a little against her teeth. She found that it had a slightly pointy bit and she was careful. Then she took the pip out of her mouth, and, delighted with its pretty browness, she laid it carefully on a stone to bask in the sun. After a while her bowl was empty and the stone held a row of seven tiny brown pips.

The little girl smiled at the pips, then she had a twirl in the garden and did some painting with her new paint box.

Soon the little girl noticed that the pips had changed colour, they had dried and become sunny smooth. She picked one up to have a closer look, but it slipped from between her finger and thumb tumbling into the palm of her other hand and all at once making a tiny giggly alive sound. The little girl was quite astonished, for in the moment of that tiny sound her hand seemed to become filled up with a soft fuzzy shimmery warm golden brown aliveness. 

She picked up the pip again, this time being more careful not to let it wriggle free. She held it close to her ear and gave it a gentle shake. There it was again that excited little sound, and with the sound the pip seemed to be telling her its secret. A secret of stars in far away skies sending their patterns with their twinkling light right into the pip’s seed heart.

Full of curiosity the little girl chose a different pip from the row on the stone and held it to her ear. Sure enough it too spoke a tappetty sound, and the little girl heard it telling her of the mixing of sunlight and raindroplets bringing all the colours of the rainbow to grow on earth. The next pip told of the purple petalled flowers and their special friendship with the butterflies and bees. The next of the bold pink blooms that had grown around the apricot tree and kept it company. Then she heard of the golden flowers who follow the sun’s movement through the sky and who have ripening seeds in their centre. One pip didn’t say so much, but seemed to listen especially to the love in the little girl’s heart. The seventh tiny pip was particularly smooth, and as she listened it whispered of the becoming of the apricot fruit, growing in the blanket of the sunny air’s breeze.

Now the little girl was sleepy, she made herself a snoozy place and there she dreamt for a while of the pips and of the soft fuzzy shimmery warm golden brown aliveness that she had held. When her mummy came to wake her, the little girl told of her dream and showed the pips, and she held them to her mummy’s ear to listen. Though her mummy listened with great care, she couldn’t hear the speaking of the tiny pips quite as well as the little girl could, and this worried the little girl. What if one day she couldn’t hear them quite so well either, might she forget? 

The little girl’s mummy hugged her close and they had an idea. The little girl found her paint box and her mummy lent her an extra fine paintbrush. Very carefully the little girl picked up each little pip, she listened again just to make sure and then she gave it some colours on the outside, to match the secret held inside.

Her mummy fetched her sewing basket, and sat with the little girl in her small house under the old velvet curtain and the kind tree’s branches. She asked the little girl about this material and that, and her hands listened to the soft fuzzy shimmery warm golden brown aliveness all around, as she stitched and formed until…...

‘Yes that’s my Pippin’ smiled the little girl and she put each tiny pip into the special pockets of the soft brown dress of the small being that danced from her mummy’s hands.