Reading a book is pure decadence and a gift I’ve given myself. In fact, I bought all the books that were recommended to me over the past years. I’ve kept a good list and now they are stacked on the coffee table. Used, of course, so I can feel the hands and eyes of others who’ve devoured these words.
When I was a child, I loved to read and would wait with great anticipation for the summer reading list at the end of each school year. It was like the secret to all the greatets books ever written being given to me year after year, growing in theme and intensity of narrative as I was. At a young age, I would walk to the Enoch Pratt Library from my row house in Baltimore City. This was when a child could roam the city alone and no parents ever considered that to be dangerous. In fact I felt my sovereignty on such walks, my independence, and capableness.
With that reading list in hand I’d enter the majesty of that library that occupies an entire city block. The marble building boasted exqusite tiled mosaic floors, high ceilings, and an architecture from ancient times it would seem. The quest to find my books before everyone else was a false anxiousness for surely not many other students started their summers diving in to fulfill the next school year’s obligation. Yet there I was going through the card catalog, excavating the aisles to land my searching eyes on the title waiting on the shelf. Steinbeck, Poe, Hemmingway, Bronte, Dickens, EB White, and so many other authors became my favorites.
Life lifts us up from these pages as our own narrative fills our time and the resources of the days passing by into years. The breeze has softened , just now a short shouldered hawk mews out a cry deep in the woods. How we are brought to such sudden stopping places, great endings that require a pause for processing, for reflection, and for imagining what is next once we start moving again. The tree in the yard has been raining yellow leaves since August. Now the pool is littered with them. I’m soaking in seasons, the one passing, and the one coming. It’s like the space between the inhale and the exhale. The tension builds in my chest like a growing panic I’m too weary to recognize as anything other than a tight drum pounding.
Something has changed in me as sure as a season of a tree recognizes its leaves are falling away or re-leafing and it has nothing to do with the seasons we name on a calendar. Nature has her own rhythm. I felt it this year, the early arrival of autumn. It was a mood the trees gave off like a golden glow. Something is warning me to prepare for a harder winter, a colder one, and one whose darkness will pull me in to read all those books from my recommended reading list.