Ticket to Adventure

As a child I wished my parents had a big musty library. Perhaps I read too many gothic novels, but I had the idea that such a library would contain secrets and mysteries and adventures. Maybe even treasure maps falling from the pages of a long forgotten book.

I had my own library - a wooden wardrobe, long out of use, that I stuffed with my own books and locked with an old fashioned key. Sadly, when we moved to Canada, the books came, but not the solid, stolid wardrobe.

I can't tell you - but some of you will be nodding in recognition - the number of times I have lugged heavy boxes of books to a new dorm, new flat, new house because if I had to spend any time there, I needed my books around me. Put it this way - my friends never wanted to help me move.

A few years back I turned my little used dining room into a libary. Yes, my desk is there too, but it's mainly for all our books. Wall to wall bookcases, and shelves of novels and non-fiction and text books and picture books all jammed merrily together.

And yesterday, while I was at my desk marking papers, my son, 10, was browsing around beind me. His fingers trailed without purpose across the spines of books from shiny Harry Potter books to my ancient Dickens collection. Then without preamble, he pulled out a tattered paperback from where it was sitting between a Tom Clancy novel of my husband's and My Darling Dead Ones: it was one of the Redwall novels, one he had not read before.

His eyes lit up and the excitement was palpable. Not just because of the book, which he will enjoy, but at the unexpected discovery. At finding just the right book at just the right time.

It's exactly what I wanted when I was a child, and I realized that I was right all along. A library does contain secrets and mysteries and adventure.

Between every page.

End Note: This is the last day of NaBloPoMo, and I'd like to thank all those of you who visited, commented, motivated, and encouraged whether here, on Facebook, or on Twitter. It's been a great experience.