_{Thank you D’verse for provoking Prompt : Place & Space}

_{Last week a local Book Store took me back to the first library I ever met. Dad insisted it wasn’t haunted, the local Doc said it was! I was five and deeply interested in everything, esp the smoking lady ghost they said visited the Bungalow’s oval mirror, next door}.

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_{We were on an island where Dad worked. The Inspection Bungalow was a tiled few rooms with green faded windows, and attached library that cooed with pigeons in its shutters. Here I met the aroma of old pages running with silvery book worm.}

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_{Most Sunday afternoons we visited the Library where dad got his PG Wodehouse & Perry Mason. Later in the noon he’d joyfully run us thru’ something new Jeeves just said. Ma would find her stash of back dated Good housekeeping magazines, and Georgette Heyer. She was this romantic, and loved reading out bits to me between blushes. She and dad were childhood sweethearts – still hopelessly in love with life, with the island we were on, with dangerous river crossings, with people of all types…..places, and oh books, even if it was the telephone directory:}

_{books made one exist on a plateau with a globe full of footprints, heart prints..it made us a brotherhood of individuals getting to know one another. It was a priceless place, free of territorial rights and assoc wars} ;

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_{later she unearthed “More than conquerors“ a novel off Romans 8:37, that steeled the way I looked at weakness: physical/emotional.}

_{Yea, the Library, outdated as it is now?- will always resurrect that part of me that dares shadows and ghosts that boo. It tickles the ribs of shutters I create now and then and let’s me into the aroma of buried pages.}

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_{Thank you D’verse for this Prompt Place & Space}.

^{Meanwhile what I found in Blossom Book store here} 😅

_{Tucked away in a shadow, 👆🏼 found this beauty (I have an older Ed., gifted to me by a visiting Belgian artist who lived in an underpass in Mumbai). She & husband had left home to be here in India and help the poor, the best they could. They later adopted twin girls from Kerala. Yeah, all this takes me back to roots that grow our pages, ya.}

_{For https://dversepoets.com/}