Wednesday, December 14, 2011

My Books

All of my books are in storage. This may sound silly, but I don't know the name of a lot of them. I just read them. I have most of the books I have ever read. My problem was this... without being able to see them, run my hands along them while they were lined up on a shelf, I could not see the stories. Since getting them out of storage is out of the question, I cannot write about them....

I have always loved books. Even when I was younger, in the fifth grade, for example, I got in trouble for hiding to read my books.  I have moved sixteen times since my mother threw me out at seventeen. I’m twenty eight. Every move I lost books, but not many. Only those that I knew I would never read again… or read at all.  

Over the last four years, or should I say three moves, my books have been in totes.  There never seems to be enough room to bring them out! I shuffle through every now and again and grab an old favorite. I have nearly two hundred books in my collection that I have never read. Many I have started to read then found another more interesting. They sit in their totes waiting to be picked up again and read to the end, dog eared pages saving my place.

The apartment I live in now is small. So small that I find it frustrating as hell. Between all my kids stuff, the birds and furniture, I don’t have room for bookshelves. Even if I did, it seems I never have the time to read.  You know that famous thing kids always say? “When I grow up…..” Well when I grow up, I want a house big enough to have a room just for my books. All the walls will be lined from ceiling to floor with shelves.  I love to walk along a row of books and run my fingers across the bindings, remembering some… seeing their stories in my head until I pass on to the next. Stopping at an old familiar, yet battered looking book and reading it for what must be the millionth time.

I miss that… losing myself to a book. My mind going crazy making pictures, guessing what will happen next, being convinced I’m right only to find I was wrong, making it that much more fascinating! I need to find time. Time to get lost.

2 comments:

  1. I like that we collaborated on scrapping the original assignment and coming up with this, something neither of us expected--when I get the unexpected and the good wrapped up together in a piece of student writing, I am happy.

    This has that nice easy rhythm and flow that a writer either has to slave to find or that comes just as easy as dewdrops on grasstips.

    Fine way to close the semester!

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