Lost book found
Oct. 17th, 2003 11:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pegkerrWhen I was about, oh, ten years old, I'd say, I saw a beautiful oversized book in a bookstore, and I fell in love with it. It was fabulously expensive for me to buy with my allowance (a whole $5.00!) but I pined for it and pined for it and saved up my pennies, and I bought it, and I loved it and re-read it and kept it. The book was Lona: A Fairy Tale by Dare Wright. It's a tale told in both story text and really beautiful black and white photographs, about a princess who leaves her home to break an enchantment that has been placed over three kingdoms, guided only by her own courage and a magic jewel that speaks to her with the voice of her lover. I took it from my home when I graduated from college, and moved it from apartment to apartment, and always kept track of it. But in our last move, we packed oh, I'd guess over a hundred and fifty boxes and they were all put in our basement of our house. I had carefully numbered the boxes and catalogued their contents, so I could find whatever I needed. And the day of the move someone walked off with the packing list and never brought it back! So we've had all these boxes with nothing but numbers on them, piled on top of one another, jumbled into heaps. And somewhere or other there was that book in there, my favorite book of all from my childhood, and I couldn't find it.
I've cursed that lost packing list so many times. Every several months, I'd go down there and root around through boxes, but I'd never find it. I desperately wanted to find that book to read to my own girls. It had fired my imagination in a way that is difficult to explain, but my deep love for fairy tales was rooted in that book. I wanted it, I wanted it, I wanted it. And for TEN YEARS, even though I knew it was in that basement somewhere, I just couldn't find it. Maddening!
Today, when I got home from work, the book was waiting for me on the dining room table. Rob had gone down into the basement and dug around for two hours until this time he found it.
I was fascinated to find similarities in it to The Wild Swans, too, which hadn't even occurred to me until now. Both are stories of a maiden of noble birth who sets out in the world alone, armed only with her own courage, with no idea of where she is going, because she intends to break a spell that has made others suffer. It even has a section where she is carried through the air, except in this story, it's by sea gulls.
I am really looking forward to reading it to Fiona and Delia.
Now if I could just find the illustrated edition of The Wild Swans picture book I had when I was a child, my happiness would be complete. Unfortunately, that book I didn't keep, and I'm sure my parents got rid of it long ago.
I've cursed that lost packing list so many times. Every several months, I'd go down there and root around through boxes, but I'd never find it. I desperately wanted to find that book to read to my own girls. It had fired my imagination in a way that is difficult to explain, but my deep love for fairy tales was rooted in that book. I wanted it, I wanted it, I wanted it. And for TEN YEARS, even though I knew it was in that basement somewhere, I just couldn't find it. Maddening!
Today, when I got home from work, the book was waiting for me on the dining room table. Rob had gone down into the basement and dug around for two hours until this time he found it.
I was fascinated to find similarities in it to The Wild Swans, too, which hadn't even occurred to me until now. Both are stories of a maiden of noble birth who sets out in the world alone, armed only with her own courage, with no idea of where she is going, because she intends to break a spell that has made others suffer. It even has a section where she is carried through the air, except in this story, it's by sea gulls.
I am really looking forward to reading it to Fiona and Delia.
Now if I could just find the illustrated edition of The Wild Swans picture book I had when I was a child, my happiness would be complete. Unfortunately, that book I didn't keep, and I'm sure my parents got rid of it long ago.