Tag Archives: cats

Fuzzy Books of Love

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We usually have at least one animal being fostered at the bookstore. It’s a good place to display cats ready for forever homes, as customers can have a hands-on experience while they shop. Plus we have the world’s greatest cleaning lady and a funny tiled closet under our staircase. The space is unusable for book display–even a small child couldn’t stand upright at the back of its sloping (and tiled) roof–but it’s a perfect kitty cave.

Summer is always high-volume for kittens; right now, we’re fostering nine plus Ma. All but one came from the shelter on their last day. We named this blended family–Ma birthed five, then three were found in a box on the side of a road, too young to eat solids, so got hooked up with Ma at the shelter–from the Little House on the Prairie books: Carrie and Grace, Half-Pint the feisty one, Caroline, Mr. Edwards, Mankato, Almanzo and The Reverend Alden (who wears a black frock coat with a white collar).

The ninth, older kitten came from my friend Anne, who smiled her way up the bookstore’s sidewalk with “Pollyanna” riding on her shoulder. She’d heard mewling from a dumpster and didn’t hesitate; sixty years old, Anne jumped in, sandals, shorts, high blood pressure and heart condition and all, mewing back until she spotted the frightened kitty scrambling up from between plastic sacks.

So I couldn’t say anything when she brought Pollyanna to me, could I? That kitten is only alive because Anne is one of those people the world needs, who believes everything with a heartbeat deserves love and care. And Pollyanna is the most cheerful big sister to the Little House brood one ever saw. She babysits when Ma needs a break.

Really, I just want to say two things. First: spay and neuter. PLEASE spay and neuter. Eight thousand companion animals per DAY are put down in the United States. All preventable. All wasted love. All wasted taxpayers’ money to get that done.

Second: foster and adopt. You have no idea how much fun is waiting for you. We used to have a rare book in our shop, a British 19th century tome of some 500 pages, entitled The Book of Love.  Now we have ten fuzzy books of love in our shop, waiting to be written.

There are actually six kittens in this cuddle puddle. Look closely!

The Stories between the Shelves

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Jack is away leading his annual tour to Scotland and Ireland. Every year he takes 10 people (max) to the Isles for a guided tour with ceilidhs and creekside walks and other not-seen-by-bus activities. He loves it, the people who go love it, and …. well, I love it.

Because while Jack is away, I hold minor revolutions in the bookstore. The first year he went, I demolished our downstairs kitchen so we could use it for books. (We live in a 1903 house, and it had an upstairs kitchen too. Since we live upstairs and the books live downstairs, it made sense. It’s not like the books cook for themselves.) Another year I moved our bedroom. A third year, I gave away some furniture.

Jack doesn’t mind. He gets two weeks conducting people around his homeland, telling stories and singing songs, and I get to organize, regroup, rethink how we do things and where we put stuff. It plays to both our strengths. It is An Arrangement.

So far this year nothing major has occurred to me. The walls are the same color. No furniture is missing–if you don’t count those ugly old end tables that have really needed to go for ages. And the changes I’ve made in where the shelves are located, and which genres are on them, well, trust me, they’re for the best.

As I’ve been cleaning and pushing and thinking and measuring, I keep encountering little items that have fallen amongst cracks and crevices,  into corners where only dust goes. In our bathroom, I found a plush frog from my friend Anne, pushed back against the Danielle Steel shelf and surrounded by books. (The fact that we keep Ms. Steel in the bathroom is not so much an editorial comment as a necessity born of space limitation.)

On the side of a shelf that other shelves had encroached against, I discovered the pewter angel my friend Cami gave me the year both our books were accepted for publication. She hung there, ignored and overlooked, still cheerfully blessing the house. I gave her a good shining before suspending her above “paranormal romances.”

Behind a classics shelf that we finally had to let cover a window, I discovered on the long-lost ledge a small resin cat, black with an elongated neck and a curious smile, that Teri brought me from a trip to Ireland some time back. It was during a troubled time for our shop, and the figure came with a small card which explained that, according to folklore, this little grinning cat had escaped many troubles and retained her lives through her own wit and ingenuity–and she would elude many more troubles yet.

On the card, Teri wrote, “Like someone else I know.”

It’s amazing, the stories we find buried between the shelves, forgotten bits of our own lives, when we stir up a little dust. And it’s lovely, absolutely, to have friends who marked those moments with artifacts, trinkets, little pieces of memory that tell the stories, not in the books, but of the humans who run the shop.

Thanks Teri. Thanks Cami. Thanks Paxton for the dancing lady and Heather for the feather thing and Jane for the ivy teapot and all the other people whose artifacts have brightened my cleaning. You make life sweeter.