When I was a kid the local library was a kind of household guru where not only the books were revered but also anyone who answered the phone. My dad’s mantra, call the library!, used whenever he was stumped by one of my questions and didn’t feel like guessing. And it wasn’t a suggestion… but delivered as a godsend solution, a way of contacting The Oracle itself. And while I don’t remember any of the calls, what I asked, what they answered (and there were many calls) I have the feeling they always came through. Wait. I remember one call. I’d received a chain letter warning me to make X number of copies… or else. Heaps of carbon paper and cramped fingers would have been involved not to mention I didn’t know enough people to send them to. Still, I didn’t want the ‘or else’ fate so asked my dad what to do and, erring on the side of caution, he decided The Oracle would probably know how to proceed and if they didn’t no one would. As it turned out, The Oracle was brilliant, I can still feel the relief in my ten year old self. Just send out a couple letters to cover your bases, they said. Maybe I’m paraphrasing. But only slightly. The Oracle never minced words.

A library is a medicine cabinet. What can heal one person may not work at all for somebody else.

—Sandra Cisneros, A House of My Own

Long postcard.

But, books.

I was speaking the other day with a friend about home library/bookshelf organization, the categories we have and I loved hearing the sameness and difference of her method to mine. For the record, mine is alphabetical and separate categories. A small room lined with thrift shop and IKEA shelving holds the majority. Novels and short stories get separate spaces. Non-fiction is divided into four categories: essays, memoir, biographies, general info. There’s a poetry shelf. One for gardening (two categories: essays and how-to). Another for nature, generally. A Canada shelf. An anywhere-but-Canada shelf, which mostly includes Florida, Austria, and a tiny island in the Caribbean. A shelf for my favourite children’s books. A small, pared down, collection of literary journals. A shelf of miscellaneous wotnots including greek mythology and holistic cat care. Dictionaries and writing related books live in my office. Art books are in a second sitting room. All food related books are in the kitchen. Yoga and anything I find inspirational, lives on a small bookshelf in my bedroom.

I used to know someone who refused books as gifts because her shelves ONLY held books of the same size and specific colours. Note: used to know.

I often wonder at the origins of a person’s bookish habits, The What and How of what we keep and Why. And, our love of books to begin with, is it a nurture or nature thing, the fact of growing up with many books or almost none, of being read to daily or never being read to, that makes a difference or is there some other mystery involved? Not sure if it qualifies as an origin story, but here’s mine.

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Earliest beach memory is picnics, my mum and dad coming home from work, he from a factory, she from the warehouse of a local Towers department store, neither of them easy jobs and I realize now they must have been tired but maybe, like me, never too tired for the beach, so they’d make coffee for one thermos, koolaid for another, throw some bread, meat, cheese, fruit and veg from the garden into a plaid metal cooler and then my dad would start up the little black oldsmobile he called fatso. It was the sixties.

The only other things we brought were towels and a blanket to sit on. The idea of needing anything to amuse ourselves surely never entered their minds, or mine I guess. After all, there was The Lake. And sand. Shells and pebbles and the endless search for beach glass. There was food to eat and clouds to look at. And there was the effort it took to pretend you knew how to swim, thinking no one would figure out you were still touching bottom. My sister, much older, said she’d learned by being tossed into the lake. I wanted to avoid that lesson.

Most vivid beach memory is the night a storm was brewing. My dad and sister were swimming way out in the lake when big rain and thunder started. My mum was frantic, waving, shouting for them to come back. My dad was laughing and waving from a distance. I don’t know what my sister was doing.

Same beach a few decades later. Me and my mum picking rosehips. My dad gone, my sister too, a decade before him. My mum would make a tea blend with the rosehips, adding (also hand picked) calendula, chamomile, linden, whatever she fancied in the moment, whatever she found in season.

Pictured above: the scene a few days ago. Different beach, entirely different body of water. The grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren of my parents, most of whom they never met, and watching them (I’ve since learned to swim for real by the way) I see new watery memories being made and can’t help think there’s something deeper that runs through generations, that whether people have actually met in life or not isn’t what determines how much they carry of each other, how much they already know of their history without even trying.

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It’s a funny thing, the how of things remembered.

I remember making these napkins seven hundred at least years ago on a sewing machine I no longer have and that the fabric is a Ralph Lauren print, which I bought from a remnants table not because of Ralph but because… blue and white. I used to have a thing for blue and white (now more drawn to turquoise, orange, yellow and green). Children with mustardy faces who now have messy children of their own used them daily to wipe that mustard and more from lips and hands and while I wouldn’t advise looking too closely, they’ve held up well (maybe thanks in part to the magic of Ralph, not to mention the magic of line drying in the sun) and I remember too a certain few folk for a patio lunch one summer day who snorted when the cloth napkins came out, insisting I needn’t treat them specially, that they weren’t above using paper like everyone else and how for a moment I had no idea what they meant by ‘treating them specially’, assumed some kind of joke going on over my head then found out they were sadly serious, that the napkins meant something on a level I couldn’t de-code and when I tried to assure them I wasn’t fussing (because this was becoming A Thing with them), that we used these napkins all the time, that we never used paper, they took even greater offense at what they assumed was a lie.

I no longer see those people (surprise!), but the napkins (and the lineage of children with mustardy faces, also a clothesline) are still happily part of our daily lives, summer, winter, fall, and spring.

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