The House of Magic

by Jody Feldman

With these gates now at your back ...

then just left, beyond this building ...

... lived one of the most magical places on earth, so magical that I couldn't easily find a picture of the place online. Imagine that! But if you were lucky, your mom would take you there every week during the summer. And holy cow! You’d actually get to bring books home ... for free! The only conditions were, you could only take five of them, you had to treat them with lovingkindness, and you had to return them. But then you could take the same ones back home again.

Because the collection there stretched back many years, a fair amount of books on the shelves looked like this:

Which is why these were frequent visitors to my house:

I was drawn to color like a cupcake to sprinkles. And yet, it was those drab, leather covers that lent our place a perceptible scent of mystery and adventure and a palpable desire to spend dark, rainy days curled up in chairs where imagination runs free.

Just perhaps, it's lucky I found no pictures of my childhood library. Now, I can continue to preserve my magical memories of that magical place that made me a reader.