This morning I ventured into the attic, nagged by the sense that I’d seen copies of some of the books of my youth semi-recently. Lo and behold, there was a box of treasures! For starters, here are the horse books:
- Helen Kay’s A Pony for the Winter
- Rutherford Montgomery’s El Blanco — The Legend of the White Stallion
- Stephen Holt’s The Phantom Roan
- Dorothy Brenner Francis’ The Flint Hills Foal
- Sam Savitt’s Vicki and the Black Horse
- Glen Rounds’ The Blind Colt
- Lynn Hall’s Wild Mustang
- Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion and The Black Stallion Returns
- Doris Gates’ Little Vic
- Margaret Goff Clark’s Mystery Horse
- Anita Feagles’ Casey: The Utterly Impossible Horse
(Gee, I wonder where my daughter’s horse-passion comes from…)
And besides these, there were a few others like Little Women, Encyclopedia Brown, Pippi Longstocking, a few Beverly Cleary books, children’s biographies of Helen Keller and Louisa May Alcott, etc.
Most or all of these would be available at the library, of course. But there’s something about finding my own old copies that’s hard to describe. These are chunks of myself. How can inanimate objects be so significant?
I also wonder how much my own attachment to these books is influencing my daughters. A lot, I’m sure. But that’s not something I’m going to get analytical about. I love that when I plopped the box down at the foot of the attic stairs, they were on it in a heartbeat, raking through the books on the floor, exclaiming, carrying them off to pore over on their own.
