And after saying that, I feel like a clichéd deadhead. But really, it was gorgeous--on Friday, it rained, but by Saturday morning everything looked limpid and sloe-eyed, sort of like a woman who's been sniveling and bawling her eyes out for the past hour and now she looks all red and puffy but her mind is clear. The sky was a swirl of silver-gray trying to be blue but not quite making it, clouds white on top, dark on the bottom, moving west to east fast.
The air itself was brisk, cool but not cold. Wind whipped up any of the stray hairs that escaped from my ponytail. If you took in a deep breath of air, it smelled almost crystalline and sweet. New Hampshire is in the full grip of fall--if you drive down 89, the sky looks like a splotchy, gray-blue layer cake. The road swerves into hills that are carpeted with trees in red and gold. If you happen to be driving behind another car and the wind decides to pick up, the loose leaves from those trees get swept down to the road to mix with the churning wheels. After all that turbulent jostling, the leaves fly out from beneath the car as a shower of sparks--one can imagine that car as a mechanical fairy leaving behind a trail of pixie dust.
It was also a wonderful weekend for going book crazy. I had discovered that a tiny, out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere town approximately thirty minutes south of Hanover was holding a book sale. It was sponsored by the town's library, but all the books were trucked out to the main room in the town hall (which doubled as a church). Once I got there, I discovered that they were going to sell the books $1 per bag the next day. So mostly I looked and just picked the books that I really wanted to have before someone else snatched them up. An amazing find on Saturday: an entire set of the Anne of Green Gables series in pristine condition for two bucks.
So today, I went back to the book sale and got there fifteen minutes before the frenzy was going to start. I scoped out the books and wondered more than once if I was slightly mad. What sort of person goes to book sales and load up on more books than a normal person could read in a lifetime? Lucky that I read fast, I suppose, because I do intend to read all the books I acquire. I don't buy books just to possess them. I ended up stuffing two bags with as many books I could cram into them. All of it I ended up paying $2 worth of dimes because I was trying to get rid of my extra change.
I got a lot of literature type books--you know, the ones that won prizes but most people never bother to read--as well as some genre books that caught my eye. A sample: The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth (a cookbook with no pictures, I figure I'll wing it if I decide to try any of the recipes), Beyond Einstein (a physics book), Essentials for the Scientific and Technical Writer, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, Gilgamesh the King by Robert Silverberg.
I guess if I can restrain myself, it'll be a while before I go into a library with the intent of checking out a book to read in my (rapidly dwindling) spare time.
