The Bookworm

There are very few people ( I believe) that have a love affair with books , as I have had .There probably are more than I naively estimate but very few who I've encountered .I come from a family who (mostly) love books and who have nurtured this adoration I have .This obsession with the almost woody scent of the pages bound together is insatiable. It is filled with delighting in older books that are slightly richer in scent with softer pages that have been held before to the crisp scent of just unwrapped and virginal pages of a new book where the ink feels minutely raised off the page. It is the inscription on the front leaf , maybe a birthday wish or the current owner (I always write my name and the year I received the book in a corner of this page) that sprinkles enchantment on the book (still unread) or the nostalgia of buying and experiencing a new story.

I've detailed before how I was introduced to reading but it is how I took to books and the large supply of them , that probably shaped me for the rest of my life . It's strange how all my favourite things to write about tie back to books ,be it the books I find in flea markets or the ones I read with the stain of mulberry still faintly on my fingertips or (this was the most common) the books I voraciously went through on rainy days.

I think everyone knew how much I liked books, because now and then someone would send a book with my mother for me to read or enquire at family events about what I was reading . I don't think I spent any part of my childhood without a book nearby , I stuck to the classics or books that were older because early on I developed a love for the style of writing and the references to a time long past . Little Women , Black Beauty or Great Expectations were regular books I read when I was much younger.

Once ,my uncle brought a box of books (I recall it being from somewhere where the owners where getting rid of old stuff as they were moving) home . They provided some of the nicest company on a winters night , when I sat with them and a heater to spend the night , sometimes only sleeping as I watched the sun rise .The books in that box took a while to get through , all the inscriptions were obviously a bit old or illegible in the faded cursive script .But I read every single one .

The local library was another favourite spot but I would always accrue fines for forgetting to bring a book back (often borrowing piles of books using 3 different cards ) until I had read all the good ones and couldn't find any new tastes to delight my palate .But every Saturday after dancing or piano ( that is another story altogether really) we would go and with my head tilted at 45 degrees I would scour the shelves for something new .Until nothing new took my fancy anymore and I moved to other sources .

And then there was Mum and Dad ,who bought me books because I would spend all time at the mall looking through bookshops .and would start reading the new book as soon as we got into the car . It was Dad who suggested many books when I was at a loss and who would talk to me about these books we both read (many times leading to a telling off by my mother and sister who had not been able contribute at all) . I loved those discussions because I felt like a person , not merely a being who was present .It was when no one could say I was wrong for thinking what I thought because they hadn't felt the book as I did .I began to see people a lot better as I didn't expect only good or only malice in everyone .They taught me about the facts of life through the many eyes of people who had lived in different era's or circumstance .

I don't think my father ever handed me a book that had no significant impact on my life .They all did in some way or the other .

I guess I could end by saying that I started reading books to learn about this open ,unknown world around me , but by reading them I soon began to understand the people in my life and how to deal with things better .They showed me how beautiful something as simple as a river in the morning light could be ,or how the smallest dreams could manifest into something much more .

An ode to rainy days

Rainy days are my favourite kind of day, not those half-hearted drizzles or those short bursts of heavy rain. No, those days of steady rain that kiss the grass with a rhythmic patter. They mean springtime as it edges into summer with days ( sometimes a week or two ) of endless , delightful precipitation. Most people moan and complain but I have nothing but happiness on those rainy day?

I associate them with the first time I had hot chocolate , made sickly sweet and too hot (burning my tongue in the process). It was a weekend away in the Drakensburg when I was six ,when sheets of water fell on the poppies that grew in splashes of scarlet around the houses. It rained that whole weekend but I remember being filled with laughter and happiness.

I recall a rainy day that was the the end of a journey for me, it was the first time I consciously registered that I had to start "growing up". It was the final day of primary school ,where (for the first time ) everyone I had known since I was four would scatter and I would probably never see them again. There wouldn't be anymore early morning walks to school to swim as the sun rose above the jacaranda trees, no more knowing everyone and I felt as the safety net was slowly disappearing under me . For so long, I had always been five minutes away from home, I knew where everything was and this was always an unconscious dependence. Anyway I remember the last time I saw many of those people who used to all I had known. It rained the whole afternoon as we cried and laughed together for the last time.

The last goodbyes where we all cried and for that one last time I walked home together with some of them, the last time we sang together. It poured with rain that entire night, I was inconsolable because I was the only one (that I knew of ) who would be going to a high school in the city (a longish drive that I now regard as normal ) so far away from the familiar small town I knew. Heck, my first day of high school was a scary rainy day where I was thrown into a sea of faces who would later become friends and sisters.

I can never regard a day with rain, as something depressive but as a reminder that everything has its place, that even after a season of dryness there is life triggered by those drops of water that fall from the heavens. That even though change comes with a storm, it washes your slate clean.