September is turning into a truly golden month. I mourn the rapidly darkening evenings, but luxuriate in the milder temperatures and cooler nights. Sleeping with an open window is pure bliss as I’ve turned the AC off, hopefully for the rest of the year. I even put on a warmer quilt last evening to snuggle into after I get up for a nighttime pee.
Walking around our little town, traversing the back alleys where I get to drink in our gentle mountains and wooded areas, watch the birds, exclaim over “weeds” covered in gorgeous blooms, I bow to our trees and plants that work so hard to remove all of the carbon we pour into the atmosphere. We humans are truly extremely self-centered, thinking only in the short term rather than taking a good, hard look at what lies ahead for our children and grandchildren. Besides, who needs all the stuff we impulse-buy?
One of the arguments for reading online is that it saves paper and thus trees, which, I agree, has some validity. Yet here my own selfishness enters in, for there is something about a book, not just the pleasure of holding it in my hands as I read, but being able to slip markers in the various pages I want to reread, to be able to go back to it months, even years later. Man has been making books since the invention of many forms of paper, and thanks to all kinds of foresight and chance, many of those books or scrolls have been preserved for hundreds and thousands of years…the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example. Once we read something online, it is gone, as it is often too difficult to retrieve for even a short time.
Trees are the lifeblood of our wonderful planet. They literally are what keep us alive by creating the oxygen we need to live, yet we keep cutting them down to serve our immediate purposes or to cover over the space they require with buildings and paved areas. Together, with the words and echoes penned upon the leaves of old and even younger forests, new worlds are opened to us as words are inscribed on what we have learned to call the leaves of a book in which new worlds and ideas are created and inspired. When reading, these words inscribed on these leaves are only inhabited within the imaginations of the reader, yet many times, the story can remain part of the reader forever.
Writing this, I find myself thinking of Dolly Parton and her focus on developing literacy in young children. Today’s hometown paper included an appeal for funds to mail books to children in our area as part of Dolly Parton’s outreach since not everyone has easy access to the public library. Even so, I suspect that once the love of books is instilled in a child, public and school libraries quickly become almost a second home, even with the allure of cellphones and other handheld devices, especially for those of us who find it easier to relate to a book than many people.
I am grateful for so many things, but today, as I write, I am grateful for our trees and the leaves of pulpwood and trees that comprise the books that I dearly treasure. May we all join with Dolly Parton to make books available to our children and young people, for it is lasting literature that may just be what will save this world we know and love.