House of mirrors?

Sometimes, I'd like to clean-sweep this place down to the bare bones and books. 

When I was a kid, I'd choose a book by feel and sight, first by size and then by color.  The books back then were either leather or that cloth binding that felt good in your hands. I like to read BIG books so they don't run out. But I love to choose tiny books -- brown first, then blue, then green, then that one shade of red that held grey mixed in. Books, back then, didn't have pictures all over the front and there were no blurbs on the back and no preview in the front and usually, no "about the author" on the inside back cover. There was just the book. The mystery. A possible friend who'd be a friend for life. Heidi. Kidnapped. Shane.

There'd be this tiny green book, thin and small -- it would fit against your hand so that you could almost hide it between your palms. One, a small brown one, was about brownies. Mischievious brownies who got coal dust on their feet and marched across the tablecloth if you didn't do your dishes and clean your kitchen and hang the dishpan on the wall. If you didn't leave milk out for them, and a bit of cornbread with it. I would heed that lesson well as a child.

There are books in antique malls, too. It's like a pound where all the puppies bark and you can't rescue them all. They are doing time with all those fluted vases and milkglass butter trays and hobnail sugarbowls. I don't know where all those things come from and who they remember and miss, all those hard working tools, all those sickles dreaming of tall grass to cut and that drawknife craving a bite of peeled poplar.

I want me a room with nothing in it but books in a stack against the wall. When the kids come home, we'll put down sleep mats and someone will pick up a book and read us to sleep.