A book my mom dreamed up. I wrote it for her.

It was my mom's idea first

For as long as I can remember, my mom talked about a book. A little corgi gets on a train by himself, rides it along the coast, and at the very last stop his grandparents are waiting on the platform. She had the title, Rally Takes the Train. She had the pun that made her laugh every single time, the grand-paw-rents. She even had the dog, because Rally is our real corgi and she adored him.

What she didn't have was the book. She talked about writing it the way you talk about something you are sure you'll get to eventually. There was always going to be a quieter season, a better time to sit down and do it.

Then 2021 happened

My mom, Debra Kay Lizee, passed away in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, before she ever wrote a word of it. I don't need to explain to anyone who lost someone in those years what that time was like. There was no normal way to say goodbye, and there was a lot of time to sit with everything that would now never happen.

One of those things was the book. And at some point I realized it didn't have to stay on that list.

I wrote it so her idea would not end with her.

Writing a book in memory of my mom

I wrote the story in rhyme, the way she always described it, short enough to read at bedtime in about five minutes. Rally wakes up early, packs his suitcase, finds his seat by the window, makes a friend of the conductor, sheds a little "corgi glitter" down the aisle, and gets to the grand-paw-rents at the end of the line. It is a happy book. That was important to me. Her idea was a happy one and the book had to be too.

Then I found Leslie Dunn, a watercolor illustrator, and asked her to paint it. Every page of the finished book is real watercolor on real paper, painted by hand. Nothing was generated or retouched with AI. That mattered to me for the same reason the book itself mattered: it had to be made by people who cared about it.

Who this book has turned out to be for

I thought I was writing a corgi book for toddlers who love trains, and it is that. But the letters and reviews that mean the most come from parents reading it to a child who misses a grandparent, and from grandparents who send it ahead of a visit so a little one knows exactly where the train is going.

If you are reading it with a child who has lost someone, I hope the last page gives you a soft place to start a conversation. If you are a grandparent, I hope it feels like a hug sent through the mail. And if you just have a kid in the train phase, welcome, Rally is thrilled to see you.

Thank you, Mom

The title is yours. The grand-paw-rents are yours. The dog is yours, honestly, he always liked you best. I just wrote it down.

Kelsey Lizee Cecil