Bound by Books

The following piece was submitted to last year’s United Planet Day Contest by Raissa Rivera Falgui.  Raissa is a freelance writer who has published several stories for children and is the author of Woman in a Frame, a historical novel set in the Philippines. She maintains her author blog at Red Room.

After the rivers surrounding our home on the outskirts of the city of Marikina, Philippines, suddenly and unexpectedly overflowed during Typhoon Ketsana, the ground floor of our house was half flooded. My husband managed to bring up a few appliances and fragile items before we evacuated, but had to leave most of our collection of books on the shelves.

Books bound us together from the day we met as young English teachers. Both of us had been passionate about books since we were children, and throughout our relationship we shared our favorites with each other. When we married, at times we would even read books together, taking turns reading chapter by chapter. When we built our home, we chose to devote one room to books.

Just the day before the great storm, I had chosen to devote my time to organizing books in my library, unpacking boxes of my old favorites my mother had sent me. We had a daughter now, a little more than a year old, and books meant even more to us now. We could hardly wait to pass on our childhood books and we had amassed new ones for our daughter up to a second-grade level. We had read to her since she was born and the benefits showed as she was already speaking in sentences at sixteen months.

Now our shambles of a home was littered with the muddy volumes I had just the day before shelved and piled in the library. The beautiful new picture book I had been reading to my daughter was a ruined mess. We did our best to save the flood-drenched books but most of them were beyond repair. With every sodden volume that fell apart, every muddied page that ripped as I tried to wipe it clean, my heart broke a little more.

I had just started a writer’s blog and a prize was being given for blogging on the topic of escape. How appropriate. I poured out the story of our evacuation. I did it as much for therapy as to win.

My blog, even in its hasty, unedited state, won me the prize of a book—Zeitoun, the fascinating account of a family whose home was flooded during Hurricane Katrina. The perfect new addition to our library.

That book was the first to be flown to us by a stranger to replenish our much depleted library, but it wasn’t the last. I shared the blog with a number of our friends, and it got to Gill Tennant, head of BookMooch charities. I had never met her, of course. She lived in rural Wales, a place I could hardly imagine. I pass fields plowed by water buffalo daily while she lives among sheep on a hillside. But she was deeply affected by my story, and rallied members of BookMooch, an online book trading community which we had occasionally participated in, to help us rebuild our library. Soon books began pouring in. A psychology book came to us from Israel. Melinda, a lawyer from New York, went to dealers of remaindered books to find a number of out-of-print titles for us, and threw in a lot more picture books for our daughter—and she even thanked us because she had such fun shopping for these books! A woman from Australia, hearing our daughter had a mania for dance, sent her daughter’s outgrown ballet clothes as well as some books about ballet. Gill not only went out of her way to fulfill our requests, but divining our interests from our list of lost books threw in a few extra volumes in our favorite genres as gifts. And she wrote a story about our daughter’s thoughts during the flood, a story we hope will someday see publication.

Our library is now back to the state it was previous to the flood, now with most of the books placed above the level the flood had reached. We have survived three more storm seasons without another flood, though there have been close calls. We now feel secure about loading our shelves with books, and derive a sense of security once more in seeing them there. There are a few books that we have still not replaced, but we are comforted by the presence of the new ones that have been given to us, along with our occasional new purchases. We can spare little money for books now, with our daughter in pre-school and with the recent addition of a baby boy to our family. But we grown-ups now have more than we can find time to read, thanks to the books given to us. We buy our children books when we can, and just this week there was a special book sent to our daughter by Gill Tennant about a girl and her new baby brother.

As attached as we are to our books, now and then we do pass some on. It is not easy, not just because of our love for printed volumes but because we need so many in our occupations as teacher and as student and writer. But we do give when we can—to relatives, to libraries, to poor schoolchildren. We know how much the gift of books can mean, and we do have limited space.

Remembering the kindness of the people who restored our beloved books to us adds to our pleasure in perusing our shelves. Our library is a small room, but within it is a world. A world of books, of kindness and of friendship extended to us by people whom we’ve never met. Geographically, we are oceans apart but we have touched each other due to our shared love of books.