Read any good books lately?

I am currently re-reading “The Wind in the Willows”. It is one of my favorite books from childhood and every time I read it I just seem to love it more, always for different reasons. I am doling it out one chapter a night like a bedtime story and get to travel to a distant time and place that only ever existed in Kenneth Grahame’s lyrical and elegant prose.

My friend Bev is an avid reader, but once she has read a book, she is done with it and never goes back to the book. Once when I mentioned that I was re-reading something she asked my why. At the time I couldn’t give her an answer other than “I like the book.”

Last night after I had seen Ratty and Mole safely off to bed, and I was turning out the light, it came to me. It’s because of my Gramma Brown.

Gramma taught me a number of things over the years of my childhood and one of them was that a good book, like a good friend and is always worth visiting. She loved Shakespeare and Dickens, but she also loved Zane Grey and any gory murder mystery that the library had in stock.

We saw Gramma year round, mowing her lawn in the summer and shoveling snow for her in the winter, but now when I think of her it’s always summer. Long sunny days, having tea and homemade molasses cookies with Grandma in the cool of her kitchen, or in the darkened parlor reading out of an old anthology of poetry to her. Out in the sun, helping Gramma in her garden. I learned a lot of the practicalities of gardening from my father, with my brothers in the thankless task of helping the old man keep up with his garden, but I learned to love growing things from Gramma. She was still in awe at the wonder of a plant growing from a tiny seed, and she was able to convey that wonder to a child.

There was always something good to eat, always a cup of tea. Always a safe place with someone to listen, or to tell me about what it was like to be a child in rural Vermont at the turn of the century.

She had had a hard life, with more than her share of tragedy. She raised 4 children alone in the depression, in a house with no plumbing or electricity. She saw both of her sons go off to the Second World War, which seems to have been the catalyst for a long and difficult mental illness, which ultimately institutionalized her for 14 years. Like all of the other difficulties in her life she overcame that as well.

This happened before I knew her. So the person I knew was someone who was the one reliable safe place I had in my own difficult childhood. She was the one who showed me that books could be another safe place for me to hide when things got to be too much, and that like an old friend, a well loved book can be a safe harbor. That the miraculous is around us every day and we need look no further than a small dried seed, which can grow into a beautiful plant, to appreciate the wonder that surrounds us on a daily basis. I don’t remember this every day. I live in a larger, busier, world than Gramma, or Kenneth Grahame did. But like an old friend, occasionally Gramma comes and reminds me. I just wish she could bring the molasses cookies and the tea.