those things that fall out of books

At my shop we deal often with boxes of random books: "These were left in my garage" "My aunt died, I don't know what to do with these" "I'm moving". There are also the trades for credit and the desperate traveller who says he or she needs gas money and would I buy a few books they happen to have with them.

But it is the boxes, the piles of ten or twelve crumbling cardboard cartons packed with books, that are our challenge and our delight. Very often these turn out to contain a nice set of encyclopedias--some off brand--missing only two volumes, with water damage to all. Or a few cartons of all the Readers Digest Condensed Books issued from 1963 to 1971, in great condition. Or stacks of old catalogs.

My partner says "the book stops here". I remind him we have to pass the book...or books..along, somehow, or else why are we in the business. For many of the truckload volumes we have our free table outside. It is there the Readers Digests go, and the somewhat damaged but still readable volumes, a lot of the romance novels, and..whenever I spy a child from the trailer parks meandering our way, a stack of interesting children's books. Over the years we've sent thousands of books out into the community; we figure someday someone will wonder why our tiny region is so book obsessed and literate, and will likely credit the school system, never knowing it was the secret book-pushers at the odd little bookshop.

Over the years it has intrigued me what falls out of the books; what little bits of ephemera have been used as bookmarks, or tucked into some volume for safekeeping.

There have been photographs, usually the out-takes, the unflattering ones where the subject was caught mid sneeze, or with her eyes crinkled shut, or with a tree sprouting from the top of her head. There have been bonafide bookmarks , usually the cheery cardboard kind with owls, puppies, and bad poetry, plus a bit of thread in chartreuse, bright orange, or dayglo pink.

Clippings: the war has ended. Someone died. Someone was born. The book was reviewed.

Letters, receipts, bills.

A few times a Valentine--from the 1930's or 1920's, pressed away. And pressed away also, flowers, now pale smudges and crumbling bits of tan or brown or murky green--a wildflower, a corsage. Once, a sprig of Edelweiss collected, according to the fading note on the envelope, in Switzerland in 1909. It had kept its lovely fuzzy white form, living in the envelope in a travel guide all these long years. I wondered what the trip was like, how the mountain air smelled, how the light struck the mountains where surely there was still, even in summer, a bit of snow remaining. What other flowers were there? Who had been with the person who gathered and treasured this?

What did the war bring to those lives?

The other day I was moving some of my own books around. My cats help me a lot, pushing over the piles I stack around my desk, pointedly nudging one unstable group after another and staring at me as they fall as if to say "normal people are much, much tidier. And please notice the gleaming white fur at my neck while you are at it." As I was gathering up some of my books of poetry, a few little papers fluttered out. I picked them up, and stopped, and stared a while out into the almost-spring air.

One was a letter I'd forgotten, from someone I had deeply loved. When his latest child was born I made a quilt for it; having made quilts for nearly all children dear to me--odd hodgepodges of fabric with embroidered animals and little snippets of rhyme and the name of the new baby. He was writing--evidently many months later--to thank me. It's been a long time since we were in the same area; it was a complicated time, but a sweet one in its way.

All the joy and sorrow of those times rushed back as I held his letter, with its news of mountain journeys and his work and the wellbeing of his growing family. I made the right choice, back in those deliriously tempting days. But in the spring, as the river runs deep and the willows start to show flashes of bright chartreuse, and the air is so sweet, I recall those days and hours so vividly. Passion is a complicated country...but the hearts of children should not be damaged. I thought that then, and I think it now, and send that now distant family my heart's good wishes, and turn back to my own. I know where I belong and where my heart's true home is--but, in another story, in another time--well, the ending could have been different. Probably not better--literature is full of cautionary tales: look at poor Anna K, and the heroines of Hardy, and Henry James, and all. Perhaps it was my background in literature that kept me to a ethical center?

Anyway, I tucked the letter into another book. And looked at the next bit of paper. My mother's handwriting, that elegant Spenserian hand, on a scrap: a recipe for Apple Crisp. Apples, honey, lemon juice, cinnamon. Topped with an oat mixture, but the recipe for that isn't with it. I remember it, however--it was an old childhood sweet, and I've often made it for my own kids.
Made me think of my latest email from my stepmother, bringing up again the affair my mother had with her husband (it is complicated indeed: two couples, one of them a church pastor and his wife. My mother, supposedly, involved with the young pastor. Two divorces. My father marries the now freed pastor's wife. Oh, soap opera had nothing on this). Now--it is, what, 40 years from that time--my stepmother writes still of her hurt and the shame of it all.
My mother always said the accusations were untrue; my very beautiful mother, buried now near a lilac tree in a far northern state. She died 6 months after my father. My stepmother says she recently found...falling out of a book--a letter from my mother to my father, sealed. Never opened. She says she'll send it my way someday, if she thinks of it.

The final thing from between my book pages turns out to be a torn card on which at some time or another I took the time to scrawl a quote from Lamartine: "I am a fellow citizen of all who think. Truth, that is my country."

It is an odd quote for me to have wanted to save--I tend to love the stories more than the truth per se. But possibly it was in a moment in which I needed the world to make a bit more sense.