What do they tell you, the spines of those books, some thick, some thin, squeezed in like sardines between precious photos and old bookends? Individually, maybe not much. Collectively, the titles and topics provide a portal into that person’s soul.
The Vogue Sewing Book, Hymns for The Living Church, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, A History of God, A History of the Jews, West Virginia & The State of Its People, West Virginia in Color, The Pillsbury Family Cookbook, An Incomplete Education, A Treasure of Great Poems, The Best American Short Stories of 2014, The Ambition of Power, Profiles of JFK, RFK, and Edward Kennedy, Jackie and The Other Mrs. Kennedy, Hillary, Michelle and Barack, and Susan Rice’s Tough Love on just a couple of the shelves. They’re but a piece of a personal mosaic curated over decades, along with pictures of grandmothers and great grandmothers surrounded by squirming grandchildren, a portrait of four siblings ages eight to 23, taken somewhere out in the hills in Southeastern Ohio on a bright Fall day, brilliant blazing reds, burnt oranges, crisp yellows, drab browns.
A grade school picture of a beaming son, braces gleaming. A middle-aged couple in a tux and a gown, likely off to church for the wedding of a grown child. A faded black & white photo, barely bigger than a postage stamp, of a teenage girl standing with her arm around her father’s waist, his arm around her bare shoulder, she in a sleeveless plaid shirt and jeans, he in a woolly rolled-collar sweater and flannel pants, his right arm hanging straight down, a lit cigarette dangling between his fingers. There’s a heavy clear glass insulator taken from some abandoned electric pole long ago, now a bookend. There’s a clear glass puppy the size of a tennis ball, sitting on its haunches, staring forward, guarding, eyes on the prizes on those shelves. A thick family bible bound in black leather lies horizontally across the tops of the books on the middle shelf. Its pages dog eared, its cover cracked and peeling from age and frequent openings into its reader’s soul.
I would love to see the insulator - In fact I would like to see the bookcase!
I love this one. So many memories rolled in there and on those shelves.