Tuck Everlasting

Chapter 1 begins by describing a winding road that passes around a forbidding wood and the village of Treegap, where Winnie Foster lives with her family. Though the wood belongs to the Fosters, Winnie has never been there or even been curious about it. The only creatures of consequence who’ve gone near the wood are cows, who, with some otherworldly wisdom, passed around it instead of through it. They avoided the ash tree in the wood’s center and the partially concealed spring at the tree’s roots, which the narrator says is a very good thing. If people discovered the spring, it would have been a disaster so great that the Earth “would have trembled on its axis like a beetle on a pin” (10).

A day’s ride from Treegap, Mae Tuck wakes and decides to meet her sons, Jesse and Miles, who are visiting for the first time in 10 years. She wakes her husband Angus, who goes by Tuck. He grouches at her for disturbing his dream where their whole family is in heaven. Mae scolds him, saying she doesn’t know why he bothers with the dream since “nothing's going to change” (12).

Tuck goes back to sleep, and Mae gets ready to leave, putting her music box in her skirt pocket and doing her hair. Though she has a mirror, she doesn’t care to gaze upon her reflection. She knows what she’ll see because she, Tuck, and their sons have “looked exactly the same for eighty-seven years” (13).