The paragraph below answers the prompt "Describe your favorite thing in such a way as to indicate that it is your favorite."
My favorite thing is my bookshelf at home. It is not a single construct, but a composite, built of several store-bought shelving units in white particle board and several more lengths of planking held to the wall by brackets. I built the planking-shelves with my own hands years ago in cascades of sweet-smelling sawdust amidst the cries of saw blades and exultations of drill bits. Both store-bought and hand-made shelves swell with the weight of hundreds of thousands of pages of books, collecting the wisdom and delight of centuries of the written word in English and other languages. Although they remain fast to the wall and rooted to the floor, my bookshelves open many doors, their solid frames giving way to winds fragrant with old ink and the pencil-scrawled comments of generations of readers. The gentle creaking of their boards as books enter and leave them bespeaks the ancientry of that of which they tell, rooting me in history even as the shelves are fixed and fixtures in my home, the focal point to which my guests' eyes are directed, and the source of what I am able to do in the work I love.
No comments:
Post a Comment