NaNoWriMo: Day 22 / Recapturing Memories

When I set out this month to do NaNoWriMo, my only goal was to reach 30,000 words. That, and to recapture some of my so forgotten memories. While I am still quite a ways away from reaching 30,000 words, I did accomplish my second task of recapturing memories. When Chris and I went to John K. King Books a while back, a lone tattered copy of one of the Wizard of OZ books made me weep right there among the dusty shelves as it jostled a lodged memory from the back of my head--as a child I owned the entire set. In my memories it was a complete set of some 40+ first editions given to me by my Russian grandmother (on my biological father's side)--I'm not sure if there were really first editions, but I was taken back to when I held those books in my four-year-old hands in awe of the sketches held inside its covers. But inside the pages there were lands that I could be transported off to while my mother read to me until I fell asleep or whenever I wanted when the yelling started and the doors began to slam.

I don't know what ever came of those books--we left rather abruptly from our home on Oliver Street in Hamtramck to live in random motel rooms with a man I barely knew who I would come to know as Daddy. And not only did we (my mother and I) leave without my beloved books, we also left without shoes on our feet--which is an entirely different story in itself (the one I am writing for NaNo), but I say all this because when I look back to that time in my life those books mean the most to me. Somehow in those pages I feel connected back to that street I grew up on.. to the grandmother I barely knew, and the father I never met.

And so here I am holding two treasured copies--recreating memories if you will--and I swear by whomever or whatever deity that I am going to pass them onto my own daughter who will never be forced to leave all she ever had or knew behind.