Over the past five years, I've accompanied my mother as she's faded further and further into Alzheimer's. Each stage of her loss has meant adjustment on my part.

I started by convincing her that she must give up her car after she drove around aimlessly for five hours when she got lost. I compensated by driving monthly to Asheville to get her to the arty stage productions she loved and running errands for things she needed. When edgy plays began to disturb her, I found PG films that wouldn't insult her intelligence. When she had to get up continually in movies to go to the bathroom, I fell back on her fine dining habit. When her restlessness prevented restaurant seating, I counted on her passion for cheesecake. When her world shrunk and she was uncomfortable going out in the world, we walked the halls of her facility. But when her feet swelled to three times their size, yet she still paced endlessly, I was lost as to how I could comfort her.

Until I remembered how she comforted me through my difficult childhood. When my mother read aloud to me as a child, her voice became different, softer and somehow magical, especially when she read fairy tales. For a time we could escape the hard time and enter magical worlds. When I grew up and read to my own children, I loved riding the waves of words, lilting them, toying with them, delighting in the way they took us to enchanted settings.

And so for months, I've persuaded her to cuddle against me as I've pulled treasured books from my fairy tale collection to read aloud to her. I knew folk and fairy tales comforted people during potato famines and in prison camps, but somehow easing my mother's agitation convinced me more fully of the enchantment.

I have been writing down books by our favorite writers and illustrators. It would make a fine start to magical journeys. These tales have no upper age limit, but complicated emotions like jealousy and greed require the sophistication of at least a 7-year-old listener.

My mother is easily pulled into the glory of illustrations. Nobody illustrates princess tales like Ruth Sanderson. Her retelling and illustration of "Twelve Dancing Princesses" (Little Brown, 1990, out of print but available through the Internet and at libraries) was a story my daughter savored. My mother listened rapt as I read aloud the magical and mysterious tale of princesses who nightly wear out their dancing slippers and the common gardener who learns their secret. Gowns, crowns and golden-leafed forests sparkle with shining highlights. A fern-bedecked ballroom boasts such architectural details as high arched windows, which set off the luminous elegance of the dancing figures. The princesses wear velvets and fur-trimmed cloaks that add texture while detailed woods, bricks and tiles give a strong sense of place. Other Sanderson greats include "The Snow Princess" and "Beauty and the Beast."

My child-literature professor in college told a story of how she remembered amazing illustrations from her childhood fairy tale book. On rediscovering this book in adulthood, she found the pictures were small and black and white. She realized that the writing alone had inspired her memories of magnificent images. Like illustrators, tale tellers are fond of remembering the stories that meant much to them in their childhoods. There is a fine art in retelling -- capturing a sense of place, using the graceful language of long-ago stories, and weaving a tale that will transport listeners to once-upon-a-time land.

One of the most consistently superb storytellers is Jane Yolen. My mother's favorite was her "Tam Lin" (Harcourt, 1990), in which Yolen turns an old Scottish ballad into a tale. She weaves the story of a "strange, forbidding castle with ruined towers on a weedy piece of land called Carterhaugh." There wanders the brave and beautiful Jennet MacKenzie with "skin the color of new cream and hair the red-gold of sunrise." It is she who rescues a young lord from the fey (fairies). The romance of language and setting is lyrically set down by Yolen, and pictures by Charles Mikolaycak give Yolen's words the illustrative justice they deserve. Yolen has devoted much of her career to retelling classic tales and penning original stories with settings from all over the world. "Sleeping Ugly" and "The Emperor and the Kite" show off her talents.

It's not just my mother who finds fairy tales comforting. Of late, when I return weary from entertaining her, I have turned to a newly published fairy tale book, one appropriate for young adult and adult readers, Louise Hawes' "Black Pearls: A Faerie Strand" (Houghton). This is a dark and daring look at seven tales, invoking the traditions of fine words and complex feelings, filling in the voids left by the classics. In "Mother Love," Gretel, like her brother Hansel, yearns for mother-love. But she is horrified to see her brother has "ballooned to twice his former size, propped on his pillows like a miniature pasha." She can't tear him away from the emotional seduction by the deceitful, child-devouring witch, who shows him a mother's kindness. "Ashes" chooses the viewpoint character of the young prince who is dazzled not by Cinderella's beauty, but by her fresh innocence that defies definition in his "weary catalog of women" he has known -- an innocence later preyed on by his superficial mother's manipulations. In these and other tales, Hawes imbues the archetypal one-dimensional fairy tale characters with feelings that run deep and strong, emotions that will touch the hearts of fairy tale fans and other readers as well.