I Turn to My Mother’s Book

There are some books it takes me a while to get through, but I don’t see any point in just flipping through long books on serious topics. If one is going to take the time and trouble to read such books, it only makes sense to read them carefully. The good ones merit attention, and why bother with any other kind? After a long trudge through history, however, and at the end of a week marked by more immediate political strife, I needed to a break, and so I picked up this old book that belonged to my mother when she was a girl and that my sisters and I read repeatedly when we were young.

I turn to her book to hold my mother close again, since we lost her nine months ago, and also to try to capture something of what she must have been like when she was a schoolgirl. 

I turn to my mother’s book to recapture my own girlhood, too, those long summer days spent reading -- sometimes reading this very book -- on our family home’s front porch, corn rippling in the fields across the road, apples ripening in the trees below and behind the house. Each soft, worn page that has worked loose from the binding I turn over with care as I read. 

Was my parents’ little grey-shingled house in South Dakota my mother’s “house of dreams”? They look so young and happy in the old black-and-white snapshots. 

I am not a collector of valuable editions, but the value of some of my books goes way beyond price. As I hold this dilapidated volume, an inexpensive reprint to begin with of a title published in 1917, I know that I hold a treasure in my hands.

Cold Enough to Crack Stones

No, not now, it isn’t. And it was not a record-breaking winter, either, in terms of cold or snowfall. But the most ordinary mild winter still leaves plenty of cracked stones behind, and as spring approaches, wind and rain conspire to keep a walker’s head down and eyes on the ground, which is the perfect way to spot Petoskey stones on the side of the road, far from the beach. Remember, at one time all of Leelanau County was underwater, so coral fossils can be found anywhere.

Some stones, albeit dry or dirty, exhibit a certain look that says, “Pick me up!” So you stop, pick it up and turn it over, and damp spots on the underside reveal what had been hidden when the stone was “face-down” in the dirt. You take it home and rinse it in clean water, and you feel happy. You have connected with ages past.

Now, quick: Why is a book cover like a stone on the ground?

My general advice to anyone contemplating book cover design is that the cover has to say, “Pick me up!” in a loud, clear voice. Then, when a browser opens the book in hand, what’s inside has to say, “Don’t put me down! Take me home!” In addition, one of the rewards of books can be connection to other worlds, far from us in time and space.

And so, because spring is on the way, on Wednesday (St. Patrick’s Eve) I got busy with general cleaning and rearranging at Dog Ears Books, my aim to have the whole place say, to anyone who comes in the door, “Slow down. Take your time. Explore. And pick up treasures to take home.”

As for my own reading, am still caught up in the essays of Camus and still falling asleep each night over The Tale of Genji, but it’s thrilling to get outdoors again, too, for longer and longer walks, as the last of the snow disappears from woods and fields. Back roads are great. Cross-country even better.