Smoldering Ink

Today’s inspiration is my Mom.

I have always been an avid reader and from the time I first received an allowance I would spend my money on books. By the time I was a freshman in college I estimated that I had invested roughly a grand on paperbacks. That is a lot of dusting, vacuuming, and toilet scrubbing. By the time I got through college, I had quite a few more. My post college existence was nomadic, and after I finally settled down in Arizona I asked if my folks would ship my books to me.

That was when my Dad announced that he had misunderstood a prior conversation and donated all of my books to the local public library.

I love my Dad a lot, and while I couldn’t really be mad at him, the loss of my library took me years to get over. I would feel a sting in my heart every time I thought of my lost copies of Little Women, or The Once and Future King, or The Hero and the Crown. The only balm was the thought that someone else might be enjoying them.

A few weeks ago, my mom emailed to tell me that my Dad hadn’t given away ALL my books, and that she had found six boxes of them under the basement stairs. Mom hauled them all to the P.O. and they were waiting for me in the front yard today. Gentle readers, I did not even mind that the postman decided to leave the boxes on top of the dirt pile where the resident stray tabby makes his toilet.

I opened that first box and I laughed in sheer delight and kissed the spine of the book closest to my face, which happened to be Cheaper by the Dozen. My books, my books, my Tale of Two Cities, my Stranger in a Strange Land, my Weaveworld, my Hitchhiker’s Guide, my Wild Seed! My Ishmael, my Fairy Queen, my Redwall, my Song of Solomon, my Stand! My White Fang, my Tigana, my Absalom, Absalom! My embarrassingly complete Pern series! My battered and torn children’s books, my anthropology texts with the orange MSU Bookstore stickers on the spine, my trilogies, my anthologies, my classics, my trash, all I had loved and lost, and now found again.

Dozens of memories flooded back to me, of how that lop-eared rabbit ate the spine of Tales from Silver Lands, and how the Pocket A-Z London guide did indeed sit in my pocket for six glorious weeks, and how Scott H. lent me Interview with the Vampire in high school and I never gave it back. How I ate buffalo with Naya Nuki, how I shivered and starved in the Long Winter, how I wandered through the dusty shelves of Needful Things, but never found what I needed to buy. How I kicked heroin with Eddie Dean and listened to Louis the swan play his silver trumpet and suffered, lovestruck, for poor Johnny Tremain when he spilled that molten silver and burned his hand.

Oh Mom, you are the absolute best. Now if you’ll pardon me, my glass of dandelion wine is getting warm.