Books

 

If I had to choose one thing that Mom valued above all else it would be books. When she was well we’d go to the library, sometimes two, several days a week. She was a voracious reader and her greatest joy was bringing home a new book from the library.

We first went to the library when I was a child. I am amazed that she never went as a child because the place became instantly important to her. We’d go to the Carnegie library in Miamisburg. Up the steps to the adult library or down a flight to the children’s library.

I, too, found it intoxicating. I couldn’t believe I could read any book in the place, actually take it home for a few weeks. It was as though I owned the book … for a while anyway. Mom, too, would bring home an armload, surely more than she could read in the allotted time. But that stack of books on the living room floor had potential and how did either of us know what we’d like before we’d read a few pages?

Dad wasn’t as enamored with books, though a few we carried home about cars commanded his attention. In fact he’d ask for more but we soon exhausted the supply in that single subject at so small a library.

Dad was more interested in ready-to-digest material (i.e. TV) and had a limited interest in most subjects. My favorite subject (science) was his least.

Mom loved books about homesteading and gardening and down-home stories written by housewives like her. She found Gladys Taber to her liking and bought a number of her books about Stillmeadow. She loved the shantyboat stories of Harlan Hubbard. She dug into the naturalists such as Hal Borland and Edwin Way Teale. She vicariously lived a while in the tiny “outermost house” on Cape Cod with Henry Beston.

In the early years she was enthused with Albert Schweitzer and wrote him in Africa and received a handwritten reply from a secretary. It was one-removed but it satisfied her nonetheless.

When we moved to Pinehaven the floor-to-ceiling bookcase in her bedroom quickly filled. She categorized the books by subject, then author and it seemed as organized at the library once was. She’d read some books over and over again, not that she forgot anything but that she wanted to relive it again and again.

I remember when Having Our Say by the Delaney Sisters first came out. She was always in favor of equality of the races and the book served as a raucous cheer from beginning to end. She grew up with a racist father and family lore repeated the story of when he called a black woman “Aunt Jemima” and received a rather testy response. Luckily her mother was just like Mom. Everyone was welcome to be her friend and share equal treatment.

Another favorite was May Sarton. She particularly loved her journals and bought every one. Mom kept a journal, too, and it is one of our most prized possessions.

Even when we lived in that second small house in Miamisburg, she had bookcases. In fact she had my grandfather build her a couple and they took center stage in the living room. Those bookcases quickly filled and eventually required some condensing.

But where do you begin when you love them all?

One area that she eventually allowed to be thinned was her collection of National Geographic magazines. In those years when I was in school she subscribed and that monthly magazine was dearly awaited. But surely a year’s worth required nearly a linear foot of space and after a decade the space requirements became to large.

There were always more books needing space, too. So when we moved the last time, the National Geographic’s were boxed and put into storage. Slowly we put them out for trash but it wasn’t an easy decision. How the whole collection would fit on a DVD which could be stored inside the pages of one of her precious books.

And yet she didn’t like books in electronic form. She wanted her reading material printed on paper, able to be held and bookmarked with another slip of paper. It wasn’t as cozy on a screen and she’d have none of it. She wanted a book to take space, to gather dust, even, and she wanted to feel the weight on her lap as she read.

She had a Kindle in her last years but it served mostly as a way to enjoy Facebook. It was convenient, of course, and her entire library would have likely fit inside its memory, but she required physical books with heft.

I think of those home libraries of days past where whole walls were devoted to books. Nowadays that wall could be reduced to a fingernail-sized chip of silicon. But weren’t books partly for show? Partly as a sign of affluence? Partly to add an outward sign of education and success?

She kept two books beside her chair at all times: a dictionary and an Atlas. She always wanted to spell a word correctly and perhaps learn new ones. She only received a high school education and yet on most subjects she could equal a college graduate. Besides words, when she read of a place in the news, she wanted to know where it was. Even in the United States – perhaps mostly in the US – she wanted to see place names in context with others.

She asked me a few times which direction was east and west. We’d been here for years and yet she had forgotten how the house was oriented. I think that’s because she never drove. She didn’t need to know directions. She was always a passenger.

As a child she had ready access to just one book: the Lincoln Library. But as an adult she had access to the world of books. She never took that for granted. A book was precious to her, a distillation of someone else’s thoughts, shared with her through time itself.

She would have been a great writer if she’d have just began. In one sense she did. She kept a journal for many years, each carefully dated and organized and now stored in a cedar chest. She wrote about common events in her life and yet each word is treasured by me. It’s the chronology of a life and the words forever speak beyond the grave.

Her books were examples of immortality. Her journals are the same.

© 2021 William G Schmidt