Do you ever just feel it, that change is coming? You’re not even sure what it is yet, but the air vibrates with it. You raise your head and sniff into the wind, like an excited hound about to hunt.
My husband pointed out you could also be a rabbit sniffing danger, but he doesn’t like change.
Anyway, it’s not just my sporty new short haircut. It’s not that our town is getting a new manager and a few of the paradigms that boxed small businesses in may have shifted. Something big is on the wind. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve owned a bookstore long enough to know when the books are restless. They sense it too.
You think this is fey jesting? Surely you’ve read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series with its amazing live libraries and orangutan librarian. L-space: where things are bigger inside than out, and hide more secrets than Horatio ever dreamed of ignoring.
Days of Awe and Wonder are seasonal for Jewish people, but an unexamined life at any time is not worth living. Maybe I’m just taking stock of what works and what doesn’t, how many simultaneous thirsty threads are sucking from the 24 allocated hours of the given day, and which ones need to go.
I don’t know. But on this first day of the autumnal months, the books are restless, and so am I.
Wendy Welch: Books, Yarn, Cats, Opioids 