Treasure

The treasure in this week’s episode is sort of the typical stuff a person might imagine - gold, jewels, silver, other precious metals and gems. It’s the sort of stuff that pirates bury, that Scrooge McDuck dives into, and certainly the kind of thing a greedy dragon would appreciate as a bed. Sounds distinctly uncomfortable to me, but then again, I am not a dragon.

But, as Tolkien himself points out, the world would be a merrier place if folks loved food and drink and song above hoarded gold, so perhaps Tolkien’s treasure trove would simply be a room heaving with people eating and drinking and singing together - Bilbo’s bath songs, anyone? But that got me thinking about what my treasure trove might be, if I were to have such a thing. And as I looked around my little office, the answer came at once: books. I’m still not sure that I would be inclined to sleep on an enormous pile of books in an underground cavern - I think bookshelves are a much better choice. I suspect that many people of my vintage were inspired and delighted by the Beast’s gift of a huge library, with floor-to-ceiling shelves brimming with books, and several of those thrilling attached ladders so you can slide around and reach any tome you choose. He might be a giant buffalo-bear in a cape, but if he’s got a home library, I think the relationship is worth a shot. Just saying.

But then, in imagining that quantity of books and where to put them all (for I do not have a dedicated home library, and so books tend to float around my home and sometimes end up in the most surprising places), I was reminded of a poem by Mary Oliver:
Things!
Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful
fire! More room in your heart for love,
for the trees! For the birds who own
nothing - the reason they can fly.

I am not planning to burn my books, dear reader. They are, I admit, too precious to me, and particularly in this political climate, book burning seems…well, inadvisable, at the least. But I have taken some excellent books out from my library recently, including a charming handbook of North American birds, in which I discovered that the tiny, fat, feathery puffballs that live in the hedge near my home are domestic sparrows: the males dark brown with white markings, the females all one shade of tawny brown. They twitter and chirrup and coax me out the door with their hopping and their stillness. They tell me spring is on its way, despite all evidence to the contrary, from within their tangled bowers in the hedge. I see them perched on twigs and branches, and marvel at trees, and wonder how many I’ll get to see in my lifetime. Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? No matter the number, it is too small. Perhaps, even more than my beloved books, I treasure my daily walks and my communion with the trees growing and arching above the streets of my city, and the plucky little birds who call them home.

Jennifer