Of Mess and Missing

Not being much into matchy-matchy home decor, I rely on books and LEGO and the kids' pottery and paintings to decorate our house.

Once, there was some deliberateness to the shelves -- board books here, off-limits stuff up high, paperbacks in this room, sports titles in the office, hardbacks there, small books on this skinny shelf, heavy ones in a stack on the bottom. But at some point, like most things around here, they got mixed together, and the randomness of the sizes, shapes and colors looked almost purposeful.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I set out to make the mess useful, and read the titles I haven't read, especially the ones the boys were assigned in school. I had neglected an earlier project, started a year ago, to read everything Blake read in eighth grade, in an attempt to create common ground. I hadn't kept up, and he'd not appreciated the effort, anyway.

The time in isolation afforded a chance to restart, I thought, and reading was up there with baking and Zoom workouts in those early lockdown days. Remember?

"You should start with 'The Crucible,'" Blake had said. "You deserve that one."

So I started with "The Crucible." And then I read or listened to many others: "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Fahrenheit 451," "Fish in a Tree," some of "The Great Gatsby," "Silver Linings," "Jaclyn Hyde," "Look Both Ways," "The Hate U Give," "Educated," "Untamed," "This Book is Anti-Racist," "The Worst Hard Time," "Little Fires Everywhere," and "The Breadwinner."

On Thursday, five days before remote learning is to start, the school sent the list of books we need to buy. I noticed the email, and then forgot it, until today. The order in which the books will be read is not clear, so I was hopeful when I saw "The Breadwinner" on the list.

"Oh, good. Maybe 'The Breadwinner' is first," I thought. "That would at least buy us some time to get the others ordered and delivered."

I had enjoyed "The Breadwinner," a story about an Afghan girl in a Taliban-controlled state, enough to take a photo of the cover and send it to my niece.

"You might like this one," I texted her, probably last May or maybe March.

That photo is now the only evidence that the book ever existed at Shady Brook Lane. Because it is lost. Gone. Shoved somewhere, likely, on the bright and scattered shelves of the family room or hallway, or hiding on Dylan's headboard, or stashed in an end table or stacked on a bedside table, or, or, or....

On this Day Whatever of This Covid Life, purchasing school books would have felt like an accomplishment, but now I've spent so much time looking for a book I surely will find once I reorder it, that maybe I'd be better off starting some sourdough or dumping a new jigsaw puzzle onto the dining room table and hunting again tomorrow.