And I’m drinking bottled water and not coffee. Yes, very sad. No, not usual. But as I’m doing everything in molasses time the last few days (I think I may be coming down with something, though I could just be stressed out a bit) I’m doing it now for fear I’ll have forgotten the English language tomorrow or something.

This week I would like to share this postcard from Postsecret for the memories of lots of books. I’ll only babble about one.

I have an old Bible that I am inexplicably fond of, especially considering how I felt about Christianity at the time it came into my possession, with a few notes and a newspaper clipping in it. I once went through page by page to find every marking, every note. The leather cover is worn to suede in the creases around the edges, and I know someone loved this Bible. It’s the Sunday School Teachers’ Edition (it has the cliff notes in the back!) and so I have skimmed my fingers over the pages wondering if it once belonged to a priest.

When I found it, spine twisted, too beaten up already to be treated as it was being treated, I bought it. $15 for a dignified end to a book someone worshiped from was okay by me. I spent the next few weeks searching for what you do with old Bibles (interestingly very few people I have met in the past nine years understand why I would do this, they look at me like I’m out of my mind and suggest old Bibles naturally belong in trash cans) but with no luck. Maybe it’s because my grandmother kept every family Bible of ours she ever had – she has a bookcase full of them, and would take them down and show me my family tree written in ancient ink, updated as people were born, married, and died. Maybe it was the memory of her Bible, with pressed flowers she can identify with events – funerals, dances, weddings. I may not share her faith, but her love for Bibles seems to have found a home in my heart with her love for people, her love for poetry, her love of learning, her love of everyone around her.

I never did find out if there was a proper way to destroy Bibles that were falling apart. It seems odd that we would have disposal rites for flags but not for holy books, but I suppose it’s possible. In any event, years in my possession have acclimated me to it. It travels with me. It lived just below my altar with candles and incense when I had an altar, now it has its own place in the antique wardrobe that smells of time and destiny. I’ve some strange bond with it. Several moves, a fire, and nine years (going on ten this October!) and I think we’re stuck with each other the rest of its life, or the rest of mine.

Anyway – enough of that. I will hopefully catch up to responding to posts and writing things soon. This blank staring at the screen thing I do lately is not cute. Perhaps tomorrow I will curl up in bed with the laptop and try to get some writing done and some rest.

You people have a lovely day. Ciao.