Northwest Florida, the part they call the panhandle, was unsettled country in the late 1800s. The government granted forty acres of land to families who were willing to move into the area, clear land and settle there. Maude Basford was a girl who lived on one of these frontier farms around 1910. She and her brothers and sisters had some schooling, but also had to learn to run the house and farm and work alongside the adults as soon as they were able. Maude was truly a Girl of the Florida Frontier.

When my children were small we had a bird book to help learn the names of the birds lived around our house. My son Brian was five when he sat down one day with a yellow pad and made his own bird book. He couldn't write, so he brought it to me and told me exactly what to write on each page of his book. I prized the book, and many years later I used his drawings as a guide for developing the illustrations in this book, and every word in this book is exactly what he told me to write in his original manuscript.To make the illustrations look like a child's work, I had to use my left hand to make...