Mary Pomfret offers a bouquet of vignettes to the reader willing to be led from the surface sweetness of existence to the dark underside of the banal and every day. Washing the dishes, chopping wood, a walk in the forest are innocent enough activities. Tread carefully. The tender illustrations by Julie Andrews are traditional in style but deceptive in intent. Her images trace a seemingly benign trajectory of the familiar and the mundane to a place where human pain leaks out.