In “A Home for Bird,” Philip C. Stead, the 2011 Caldecott winner for “A Sick Day for Amos McGee,” seeks to answer them in a more lighthearted way. The story concerns a toad named Vernon who finds a wooden blue bird fallen off a speeding pickup truck. Bird says nothing as he is introduced to Vernon’s friends, Skunk and Porcupine. In fact, throughout the story, Bird is mute while Vernon shows him the river and forest and his other favorite places. Skunk and Porcupine speculate that Bird is lost and homesick, so Vernon searches for a home for his new friend: a bird cage, a birdhouse, a nest. When none of these elicit a reply, Vernon and Bird go on an aerial journey in a teacup tied to a balloon.

The search ends ingeniously with Bird happily installed in an empty blue cuckoo clock. It is there we finally hear Bird’s voice and the story comes full circle (observant readers will notice the conclusion was quietly and cleverly set up in the opening pages).

Stead’s splashy, colorful pictures are warm, funny, appealing and drawn with a light touch. Skunk and Porcupine are portrayed with soft, blurry edges that add to their charm. Often, Stead uses color to make emotional and symbolic connections, as when Bird finds a home in a clock of the exact shade of blue he is. Taken together, text and image convey the message that each of us has one true home and nothing else will do.

The former poet laureate Ted Kooser’s “House Held Up by Trees” is a lyric, poetic story, stark but also imbued with a haunting beauty. One could easily imagine the tale, in a slightly different form, as a Kooser poem for adults. A man and his two children live in a country house set “on a bare square of earth.” The emotionally distant father is intent on creating and maintaining a perfect lawn. His children, however, love “to play among the trees” in the adjacent wooded lot. From the outset, tension exists between nature and human nature, the daughter and son finding solace in the outdoors even as the father continually tries to mow it down and contain it.

Time passes, the children grow up and leave, and eventually the old man moves away too. The empty house becomes derelict, the windows broken out, the paint flaking, sparrows nesting inside. Without people, the house and its surroundings become the story’s main characters, one passive, the other active. As nature takes over, seedlings sprout everywhere and grow into saplings, and finally into trees that raise the broken home off the ground.

Jon Klassen’s illustrations are quiet, delicate and nuanced, amplifying the text in fresh, original ways through the use of unexpected angles and perspective. The pictures follow the house through different times of day and night, and through seasons and years. A powerful image of a house held aloft like an offering in the hands of nature closes the book, an image that stayed with me long after. The story’s preoccupation with emotional isolation, abandonment, decay and transformation has keen parallels, I thought, with the arc of some human lives (a metaphor that will, fortunately, sail over the heads of most young readers).

The power of nature to win out or hold sway over modern life is similarly taken up in “Out of the Way! Out of the Way!” by Uma Krishnaswami. In a village in India, a tiny tree sprouts in the unlikeliest of places, the middle of a dusty, well-worn path. A small boy carefully piles stones around the seedling to keep it from being trampled, and it steadily grows into a majestic tree as the path becomes a busy road, and then an even busier highway full of roaring traffic. The title, used very effectively as a refrain throughout the book, emphasizes that change is hurrying us along much faster than we want to go.

The chaotic, packed pictures by Uma Krishnaswamy (a different person from the author), a combination of primary colors and black-and-white line drawings, have an old-fashioned, outdated feel to them. Children who like the “busyness” and manic activity of books by the writer-illustrator Richard Scarry might like these. But for some readers, myself included, the art could feel a bit too busy and bewildering, lacking as it does a focal point. Maybe this is the point: that there is no one place to focus, relax or stop in our unsettled world, except perhaps under the spreading branches of a tree that has managed, against all odds, to flourish in the middle of a road.

All three of these books speak to our deep need for quietude and sanctuary, and for that actual and metaphorical place called home. Like light, air and water, home is something we cannot do without, whether it’s in the form of a cuckoo clock, a house held up by trees or the space of silence beneath a spreading tree.