Book Sale

At nine o’clock this morning, the library book sale began.  This was the big sale; the hardback sale; the sale around which we had planned our vacation to Maine.  My husband even came along even though he was certain that he wouldn’t find a thing.

Last year, the kids and I just happened upon the sale, in one of its final days.  There were a few people here and there in the community room; balancing a stack in one arm while considering another book.  A man glanced at my arms. 

“That’s why I bring this.”  He pointed to his backpack, bursting with books.  “Holds more and keeps my arms free.” 

I smiled and picked up Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.  I studied the back.  Would I really read it?

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By Heart

This post was written in response to a prompt from the red dress club: asking us what we learned by heart in childhood.

To know something by heart is to love it so much that you hold it within your heart forever.  Growing up, I knew by heart our community bookmobile.  Every two weeks the bookmobile would round the bend in the road and toot the horn a couple of times before parking at the side of the road in front of my neighbors’ house.  I would go to my jewelry box and grab my library card; thick salmon cardboard with a piece of metal affixed to it.  I loved everything about this card: the raised letters of my card number; my shaky yet solemn signature; the little plastic sleeve it lived in between bookmobile visits.  My library card was my license to travel. 

Mom would give us the go-ahead, and my sisters and I would race out the door and down the hill.  There were three bushes—small, medium and large—separating our property from the neighbors’ place.  I ignored them, running between them and on to the lawn next door. 

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