ROXABOXEN - the rhythm of time
Did you and your friends build a town out of rocks and driftwood you found on the beach? Did you build pretend stores out of boxes to sell cookies or ice cream? These are the roots of my childhood. The rhythm of my childhood days.
Alice Mclerran, in her book Roxaboxen, captures the magical days of childhood. This story is based on events that really happened, to Alice McLerran’s mother, on a hill in Yuma, Arizona. Ms. McLerran used her mother’s manuscript, memories of relatives, and letters and maps of former inhabitants of Roxaboxen to recreate this magical world. A Kirkus reviewer wrote:
“Many books memorialize imaginative play in the hope of inspiring a new generation, but rarely with so much creative and evocative power.”
Roxaboxen, by Alice McLerran, and illustrated by Barbara Cooney, though published in 1991, is timeless. The story awakens the magic and imagination of childhood. The children of Roxaboxen create a place that will live in their hearts through the ages.
Relics of this magical town will be there for the next generation.
ROOTS AND RHYTHM
On a desert hill a group of children create an entire world out of what they find in the sand; rocks, some old wooden boxes, cactus, pieces of pottery, round black pebbles, and shards of colored glass. It had all been there before them. The Town of Roxaboxen grows. Streets are edged in white stones. The children build their houses, marked by white stones, and use boxes for shelves. 
A Town Hall is constructed, and Marion is mayor, of course. There is a bakery, where cakes, pies and bread bake in the warm sun, and two ice cream parlors where they can eat all the ice cream they want.
There are wars, often boys against girls. Their swords are the sharp thorned ocotillo.
The girls have Fort Irene (which remains in Roxaboxen Park). There is also a cemetery, where a lizard is buried.
Everyone has a car, using anything round they can find as a steering wheel. If you break the speed limit you go to jail, with a floor of prickly cactus. All you need is a stick for a horse, and you can go anywhere, no speed limit.
The children grow and move away. They never forget their magical childhood on Roxaboxen.
50 years later one of these children visit. White stones and shining desert glass that had outlined houses and Main Street remained.
Roxaboxen was still there.
Roxaboxen is still there. 
HISTORY OF ROXABOXEN – ROOTS
At age 11, Marian, Alice McLerran’s mother, began writing a history of Roxaboxen. She and her friends used their imagination to build a town out of stones and wood on a sandy hill. According to Alice, her mother intended the special hill to be loved forever. She completed her handwritten book in 1926.
Alice McLerran began to write her text from this manuscript, information she had from aunts and others still alive who had played there, and memories from what her mother had told her when she was still alive.
Roxaboxen is still there.
Children in Pakistan, Korea and Japan dream of Roxaboxen, as the story is available in editions translated into their languages. As soon as children in Yuma, Arizona read it, they realized that the hill was in their own town. It looked different, as contractors tried to bulldoze the hill to flatten it into a building lot. They hit solid granite, so gave up, but had done a lot of damage, scraping away mounds of sandy soil that held “Roxaboxen money”. A granite outcrop became Fort Irene in 1915.
The neighborhood kids didn’t care that it was flat, they knew it was Roxaboxen. They built roads and houses with stones and sticks. One morning the children found pieces of polished colored glass that a grownup had left for them.
A Yuma-based organization, The Friends of Roxaboxen, saved the hill from the danger of development. The hill is now owned by the city of Yuma and preserved as a natural desert park.
Ms. McLerran’s siblings, cousins, and some of those who built the original community helped raise funds at the Roxaboxen Festivals organized by the Friends of Roxaboxen. Roxaboxen Park opened in 2000, an
“open space encouraging imaginative play with rocks and boxes.” -Alice McLerran
The opening of Roxaboxen Park, Yuma, Arizona, 2000.
The last and youngest of the Doan sisters, who had played at Roxaboxen and had taken a memento from the hill, asked her great-granddaughter, Hannah to return it as part of the opening ceremony of the park. Hannah lay one of the special black pebbles that was used as Roxaboxen money on the outcropping of granite that was Fort Irene.
THE ROOTS OF STICK HORSES
Children have used long sticks as horses in play for centuries. There is documented history of children riding stick horses, known as hobby horses. These “horses” were straight wooden sticks about 3 feet long with a wood or stuffed fabric head attached. Some had small wheels attached at the bottom. 
This toy was also know as a “cock” horse.
Ride a Stick HORSE to ROXABOXEN
By Lyn Jekowsky
A stick for a steed
all that you need
to travel the desert town.
Roxaboxen
Streets lined with white stones,
also our homes,
and a shop that bakes bread.
Roxaboxen
Black stones for tender,
colored glass splendor,
a mayor and town hall.
Roxaboxen
A magical spot
will live in our hearts,
reimagined by generations to come.
Roxaboxen
Alice McLerran, author of Roxaboxen
Ms. Mclerran has a much formal education: a Ph.D. in anthropology from U.C. Berkley, and M.P.H. and M.S. from the Harvard School of Public Health. She has studied and lived all over the world. She’s had various other jobs: a maid at Yosemite, a clerk at an automobile agency, an anthropology teacher, and an evaluator of programs at a mental health center. She also reorganized the administration of an orthodox yeshiva and that of a university career counseling center.
She and her physicist-husband, Larry, live in Minnesota and travel the globe.
Alice McLerran has written many beloved picture books. Listed below are a few of my favorites:
- The Mountain That Loved a Bird, illustrated by Eric Carle. A bird’s commitment to friendship brings life to a barren mountain.
- The Year of the Ranch, illustrated by Kimberly Bulken Root
- The Ghost Dance, poetry, illustrated by Paul Morin. “McLerran’s elegant, spare text begins by describing the result of white settlers’ relentless westward movement in the U.S. … [Paiute visionaries] dreamed that if Native peoples danced, the white people would disappear and the ghosts of the wildlife that had been decimated would return …” Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Dragonfly, written and illustrated by Ms. McClerran
- Dreamsong, illustrated by Valerie Vasiliev.
Barbara Cooney, the illustrator of Roxaboxen, has written and illustrated 110 children’s books.
She is remembered by many for her love of nature and the beautiful lupines she illustrated in her book, Miss Rumphius, which she also wrote. Miss Rumphius earned the American Book Award.
Barbara Cooney received two Caldecott Medals for her work on Chanticleer and the Fox and Ox-Cart Man, and a Newberry Honor Award for Kildee House.
I have listed below a few of her most popular books:
- Miss Rumphias
- Ox-Cart Man, Caldecott winner
- Island Boy
- Chanticleer and the Fox, Caldecott winner
- Hattie and the Wild Waves
- Eleanor, a picture book biography of Eleanor Roosevelt
- Kildee House Newberry Honor
- Squawk to the Moon, Little Goose
- Basket Moon, published 6 months before her death