Artist: B. W. Harwell
The things you lose can be remembered most fondly. Happy children are readers, but often lonely children read more. Those times when a class could go to the school library was special. At least for most of the children.
We were marched into the library with a partner. Absolute silence was demanded. We sat at tables of about six children, boys on one side of the room, girls on the other. A table would be selected to get up and find one book each, returning to sit down. Usually the most orderly group got to go first. There would be murmurs as some children were jealous and thought they got the ‘worse’ books to pick from.
I had a favorite that I hid on a lower shelf. There never was time enough to read a whole book. And that is where the book was lost because I can see the room, see the chair I sat in so that I could see the bookshelf and I remember the stories. But I cannot remember the title.
It must not have been written by Robert Louis Stevenson. (See today’s post on After Narcissus.) Another author must have written the short stories based on Stevenson’s poem, The Land of Counterpane. I visualize a patchwork quilt with each square telling a different story.
I loved that book. I could see the colors and patterns as clearly as the quilts my qreat-grandmother made. She used pieces of our dresses and scraps from a basket. The basket stayed by a slipper rocker where she sat. My job was to thread a number of needles on a spool of thread. She could not see to thread needles, but made very neat stitches. I do not remember her voice, only her hiccups. Everyone ran around with home remedies when she would get these convulsions. So when I was reading that book, I was thinking about our quilts and our Grancy.
Who knew?
No one I ever told about that book remembered it. I see now that songs were written from Stevenson’s words and that they were quite popular. If I cannot find the book of stories, I may have to write one myself.
