About Orange
Foreword
My dad loved to tell stories. When I was a child I used to sit in his lap and listen to him talk about the days of his youth and what life was like back in the 1930’s and 40’s. The stories were simple and short. Life was simple, too.
As the years went by, he continued telling his stories, only they were for my children and their children and my nieces and nephews. Pa, as everybody called him, is gone now, but his love of story-telling still lives on. The younger children in the family won’t even remember him in a few more years. So, as a tribute to him, I have written Orange Down Under as if Pa is telling the story.
Find yourself a nice, cozy, comfortable place to read and imagine a kind, loving grandfather telling you about Orange the Pig. Pa would be so pleased.
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Note From the Author
Orange Down Under was born out of my need to read bed-time stories to my grandsons, Joel, Ethan, and Seth. They live in Wyoming, and I live in Nicaragua. So you can see my dilemma. I decided that if I couldn’t read to them, I could write to them.
I knew Ethan liked pigs, so I asked him, “If you had a pet pig, what would his name be?” You never know what you’re going to get when you ask a question like that. Who knows what’s in the mind of a 5-year old boy? His answer – Orange. OK. I can work with that. So the first couple of chapters was given to assigning a meaning to that name. I had no clue where the story would go from there.
After reading the first chapter, Joel asked me via email if Orange could sing like a didgeridoo. I must confess I didn’t even know what a didgeridoo was. So Nana began searching the internet. I found such fascinating information I had to just start writing. Chapter after chapter. Later I learned that an Australian Aborigine had been a guest visitor at Joel’s school, and had actually played his didgeridoo for the students. Who knew?
At this point I decided to bring my sister in as editor. Together we started coming up with more ideas and more stories until the book became hers as well as mine.
By the end of the book we had decided to take Orange and Jes to lots of different places and make the books as educational and fun as we could. Orange in Red, White, and Blue takes them on a tour of the United States. Orange in the Snow finds them in Alaska, and after that the world is their stage. We hope the young readers out there have as much fun, and learn as much from reading about Orange and Jes, as we did from writing it.