Part I: An Old Cloth Book
Part II: Seven Times One
Part III: About Aunt Meg
Part IV: A New Cloth Book

I love books.

For as far back as I can remember, I have loved them.

My first book was an ABC book made of cloth. Not very exciting -- "A is for Apple" and so on -- but I dragged it around with me until it was more than a little soiled and bedraggled.

I was still dragging it around after we moved out to the farm the month I was two years old.

Then one day my mother began to read to me from an old book of my brother's.

Such joy and excitement! What a wonderful thing a book was!

I learned to read by watching the words as she read them aloud.

And I was off and running! I read everything I could get my hands on from them on.

A neighbor boy had a book of the most fabulous fairytales and I wanted that book so badly!

I think colored pencils must have been relatively new then, for this boy went crazy over my brother's set of them.

The book had lost its cover and quite a few of its pages had been torn raggedly from it. It must have started over about page 20 because of this, but the stories were so different from any I had heard that I just had to have that book.

I got the book -- for one of my brother's colored pencils.

Needless to say, my brother was not exactly happy when he learned what had happened to the pencil he had loaned me.

He told me the book was just an old ragged thing not fit for anyone to read and I'd had no right to trade his pencil for it. I had to get that pencil back!

I had to take my precious book back to the boy and ask him to give the pencil back so I could return it to my brother. How could I? How could I give up the book I loved so much?

I balked and he insisted. We made such a fuss that our father heard us and demanded to know what was going on.

My brother very indignantly told him that he had loaned me one of his colored pencils and I had traded it for that worthless old book and he had told me I had to trade back.

My father said that I should not have traded the pencil when it had only been loaned to me but that the boy had not known it was not mine. It had been a fair trade, as far as the boy was concerned, and it would not be right to ask him to give back the pencil.

Case closed.

I kept the book.

It wasn't a pretty pencil anyway, I thought. It was yellow and, after all, how many times would you use a yellow pencil?

What would you color yellow, anyway?

Well, the sun, I suppose.

And, I guess the stars -- .

The moon, too, maybe?

Not much . . . .

In second grade I discovered a truly wonderful book at Grandma's.

The book had belonged to Grandpa's sister, Meg, who had died from tuberculosis.

All of Grandpa's brothers -- except the youngest -- and both sisters, as well as his father, had succumbed to the dreaded disease.

Aunt Meg had gone out to New Mexico and was much improved but had been so homesick she returned to Iowa and died there -- two years before I was born.

I don't remember the name of the book but it had a hard back covered with padded gray cloth. A black and gold embossed design and lettering made it the most beautiful book I'd ever seen.

I spent many happy hours reading the stories and poems in that treasured book.

On my seventh birthday I sat beneath Grandma's grape arbor and read a poem about being seven years old.

The poem ended with the words, "I am seven times one today." And I felt as though it had been written especially for me, even though I knew it had been written many years before.

How I loved that book!

Sometimes I'd wonder just how long TB germs could live and if there might still be some within the pages of that beloved book. And, if so, would I, too, get the disease?

I didn't know. But I decided the risk was worth the taking.

I just could not give up that book!

I remember the house Great-Grandma lived in. And I remember the night she died.

Three years old, I was with my mother and some of her women, sitting in Great-Grandma's kitchen. Just waiting, I suppose, to be called to her bedside.

Years later, my aunt told me that one of Great-Grandma's neighbors had confided this story to her.

Aunt Meg had come over to her house one day to ask her if she would come to their house that night so she, Aunt Meg, could die.

She had wanted to die the night before, she'd said, but she had not wanted her mother to be alone when she left.

So the neighbor lady went over that night to stay with Great-Grandma (Aunt Meg's mother).

And Aunt Meg died . . . .

Remembering my first book, I bought a new cloth ABC book for my daughter when she was a few months old.

She opened it to the first page, looked at it, felt it, closed the book and disdainfully tossed it aside.

She never touched it again.

We read to her for an hour each day. She listened to every word, then wanted one of the books we'd read from.

Instead of a good book, we gave her the old TV Guide when a new one came each week.

She'd sit in her playpen, Guide on her lap, turning the pages one at a time and scanning them thoroughly.

After a few days of "reading" the guide, she became bored with it and began to tear out the pages.

(Gentle hint that she wanted a new book and it had better be of nice rustley paper!)

Seems odd, but I think that her rejection of that cloth ABC book brought me to the realization that every person -- regardless of age -- is an individual with his own individual likes and dislikes and that just because you have liked something does not mean that someone else will like the same thing.

And that being my child did not mean that she would be like me.

She was, in fact, teaching me -- in a no-nonsense way -- that she was no carbon-copy of her mother . . . .