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My Journey to the Riverbank: How I Came to Enjoy The Wind in the Willows

ByKailyn Clay

In 2025, at the age of 36, I read The Wind in the Willows for the first time.

But let me start at the beginning, which was February 16, 2022, when I wrote this brief and banal review on Instagram about an abridged version of The Wind in the Willows that I’d read to my daughters:

[My girls and I] were touched by the friendship, kindness & loyalty of Water Rat, Mole, and Badger and we laughed at all of Toad’s antics as he chased his dream of driving a car.

Cheerful as that statement is, I can’t reconcile it with my memories of reading the book. When I think back, I would’ve said that I wholly disliked the abridgement, and that it soured my interest in ever reading The Wind in the Willows in full. A more honest review would have read: “I don’t get it. I’m not even sure why this is considered a children’s book.”

A Reintroduction

I still ponder that today. But far from being repulsed by an unmemorable abridged adaptation, I wonder whether I would’ve appreciated the full-length novel nearly as much as I have as an adult. I can answer myself heartily: no. Until last year, I wasn’t old enough to read The Wind in the Willows. Until last year, my accumulated experience in motherhood and homemaking had not yet prepared me for the immediate kinship I felt with the characters along the riverbank.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Because just about a year ago, Kenny & the Dragon by Tony DiTerlizzi serendipitously entered our lives. As soon as I started reading this to my girls, I grasped the allusions to Kenneth Grahame’s work. Some quick research told me that Kenny and the Dragon was DiTerlizzi’s “complete reimagining” of The Reluctant Dragon, that classic tale of a dragon who is unwilling to do the stereotypical work of a fire drake by fighting the knight. It is also one of DiTerlizzi’s favorites.

My girls and I were quickly enchanted by the bookish Kenny Rabbit, the poet-dragon, Grahame, and the whole cast of characters in Kenny and the Dragon. (I also want to humbly interject that I read the entire novel with character voices, and even kept them respectably consistent from chapter to chapter.)

With my interest in Kenneth Grahame reignited through Kenny, I found myself wanting to test the waters of Ratty’s riverbank once again. I found a lovely audiobook version of The Wind in the Willows, narrated by Simon Hester, which quickly drew me into the setting and then completely swept me away.

The homebody in me instantly understood the Water Rat as he paddled his boat and waxed eloquent to the Mole about the virtues of his riverbank. I nodded knowingly along with Mole and Badger as they discussed the finer points of their homes under the ground. And I shuddered with Mole as he understood the call–that ”fine filament, the telegraphic current”– of his old home, which he’d abandoned to enjoy life up top with the Water Rat.

The Glorious Routine

It was the COVID-19 pandemic that set me on the path of finding security in the daily routines of home life. In 2020, I found myself the stay-at-home mother of a 3-year-old and an 18-month-old, neither of whom napped, with very little structure to help us survive the days that were melting one into another as the shelter-in-place orders were extended again and again. I built a daily rhythm for us then which we still follow today.

In 2021, we added homeschooling, a family profession that thrives on routines within the home, and in 2024, we moved to a new house which took me longer than expected to adjust to. Moving to a patch of land in the country was part of the long-term plan, but I didn’t know that the open-concept house that we bought would make me feel so claustrophobic in its openness.

Again, as a way to adjust, I turned to routine. I added some specifics for myself—early morning time in scripture and a day of the week to focus on my writing—and over time, the spaces have become worn in, and welcoming, and mine.

The expectation built by these rhythms is one of their greatest powers; they create a movement from one thing to the next that becomes habitual and well-worn, like a favorite spot on the couch. The rhythms sustain us, inviting us into our familiar spaces and everyday work again and again, and helping us avoid that sensation of “stir craziness” which my friends bemoan. I can’t help but chuckle at their quizzical looks when I tell them, perhaps after a nasty blizzard, that we spent a whole week without leaving the house. Their look says this isn’t normal behavior, and they wonder that I still have my sanity.

Those long days at home are becoming fewer, but there is a calm in knowing the shape a day will take, whether the schedule is busy or not. There is also a sweet longing when life has kept me away from home, be that for a few hours or a few days, to be back. There is always a normalcy, expectancy, waiting there for us. Now, along with the residents of the riverbank, I can say, “the rattle of the door latch, the sudden fire-light, and the sight of familiar things greeting us as long-absent travellers from far oversea” are well-known and welcomed. Or as middle-grade author Amanda Cleary Eastep recently put it, I am “secure in the arms of the mundane.”

It was C.S. Lewis who famously said that a good children’s book is one that can be enjoyed just as well at age fifty as at age ten. For me, it was the tender age of thirty-six that put me in the right frame of mind to take this novel in (and it turns out, Lewis also first encountered The Wind in the Willows as an adult!). It bodes well that I still have the eyes and ears to enjoy a children’s story. The knowledge allows me to hope that with every subsequent reading I will find more depth and more to reflect on in the lives of my friends along the riverbank.

Kailyn Clay
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