i love books.

The other day I found myself nestled up with a borrowed book. It was older and I delighted in the smell of its aging pages. The aroma instantly conjured images of me as a tot attending Teddy Bear picnics at my local library. The book smelled historic and important. It made an otherwise rainy day, nostalgic and charming. This feeling was because of the novel, but it was more about the feeling of the book, its weight in my hand, the feeling of turning the pages, and overwhelmingly the aroma.

It occurred to me after I reveled in this experience for a bit (I know life in the fast lane) that this might become one of those experiences that becomes obsolete. The world is tentatively adapting to a sleeker future adorned with ipads, kindles, and nooks. I am a very tactile person, but I have accepted many conveniences as such. Similarly, I enjoy the process of a record player, lifting the needle, placing the record, dusting it, and hearing the crackle of the first chords. However, I walked away from my record player years ago.

During this thrilling revelatory period, I began to realize there are certain details of my children’s childhood that will differ extremely from my own. For example they will never yearn for the brown nosing task of clapping chalkboard erasers nor will they find the need get up in the middle of a test to sharpen a pencil. They also probably won’t learn how to write cursive or be hugged by their teachers. For whatever reason, that freaked me out for a substantial amount of time. Then I realized so many other scary things are destroying childhood, which is probably going to force me to raise my kids in a hippie commune anyway, so they probably will have chalkboards and real books. And that made me feel both better and worse at the same time. Happy Monday!