�There�s a lot of noise in Narnia!�

AJ�s muffled voice comes from the broom closet in the corner of the kitchen, which has temporarily been converted into a wardrobe.

�Why is there so much noise in Narnia?�

The broom closet door opens.

�Well, there are some kids jumping on the trampoline in there.�

�There are? That sounds like fun!�

�Yeah. I�m going to do it too. Bye!�

A few minutes later, after much clanging and banging from a space only a four-year-old could be happy to be inhabiting, AJ emerges, blinking, into the kitchen.

�You�re back! How was your trip to Narnia.�

�It was too snowy in there so I came home. Mr. Tumnus says hello."

* * * * *

AJ got his first taste of Narnia when, on our drive home from Thanksgiving with his grandparents, we passed a billboard with an enormous picture of a lion. AJ was riveted. But strangely, his interest has passed straight over the somewhat contraversial new film and has fixated on the books. When we finished Ozma of Oz (the third book in the Oz series that we�ve been reading out loud at bedtime) earlier this week, he asked if we could read Narnia. I rifled my bookshelves until I found my well-worn paperback copy of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and began to read about Lucy and Edmund and Susan and Peter. I found myself stopping to explain a lot.

�What�s a wardrobe?� That was an easy one. It�s like a closet, but it�s not attached to the wall. My parents still have a pair of mahogany wardrobes that we used when we were living in a closetless English flat. The smaller of the two stands in the room AJ sleeps in when we stay with them. The larger, though, was always my favorite. It was in my room as a child and it was full of little doors and drawers that pulled out and pushed back in with fascinating brass hardware and a key that looked like a real key in a picture book to lock it all up. The wardrobe appeared in the room about the same time I discovered the Narnia series as a child. I used to climb into it and pull the door almost all the way shut (for, as C.S. Lewis notes repeatedly in the first chapters of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, it is never a good idea to shut oneself in a wardrobe. I�d close my eyes and feel my way through the clothes, but I never found anything but the wooden back that smelled faintly of mothballs.

�What�s batty?� Crazy, loopy, or possibly barmy, although the latter is likely to just require a longer explanation.

�Where is their mom and dad?� Explaining the wartime evacuation of London was a little trickier. I left it at �They had to work, but they thought the children would have more fun in the country.� And so they did, too.

This morning at breakfast, we were looking at pictures from the new Narnia movie on a box of Cheerios. AJ traced his finger around the letters in Mr. Tumnus� name. �Mommy, Mr. Tumnus isn�t a fawn faun. He�s a human faun. And I found myself explaining the difference between fauns and fawns, which is quite great. One of them lives in our yard; the other is half man, half goat.

I love sharing such books with AJ and I love seeing him take the stories to heart the way I did, although he is much younger than I was when I first discovered this particular book. Still, we both needed to thrust our hands, our whole bodies into a mysterious space just to see what would happen. Because maybe, sometime when we�re least expecting it, we will open the broom closet and find snow.

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