Dear Miranda

Chapter 4 - The Books

Miranda, feeling better and refreshed after a quick shower, grabbed the stack of books and put them on the coffee table. She went into the kitchen and grabbed a glass of lemonade full of ice and some tortilla chips with salsa to snack on while she looked through the pile. Finally, she adjusted one of the fans to blow lightly on her to help try to keep cool while she settled down on the futon.

Even though she had carried the stack of books from Gran Mere's house to the car and then into her own home, she really hadn't had a chance to look at them. She kind of expected that they would be mostly children's books and was surprised to notice that the first two books in the pile were actually thicker and more like novels. She turned the leather-bound books sideways and looked at the spines; Treasure Island  by Robert Lewis Stevenson and Tales by Edgar Allan Poe.

The books looked old but well maintained. She set them off to the side for future investigation and looked at the third book in the stack. It had a picture of the front of a bicycle with the title Hide and Seek by an author called Katy Grant. Weird. It looked more like a boy's book than something she might want to read. She set that to the side and looked at the other two books in the stack.

The first she recognized right away by the big brown bear on the cover;  Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See?  by Bill Martin, Jr. That had been her favorite book. She still remembered all the animals and their colors especially the blue horse and the purple cat. Grand-Mére would tease her that they really existed. Miranda would say "no way" and Grand-Mére would simply nod her head, "Mai oui, mon petit, they do, and one day I will show them to you."

Miranda smiled, running her hand over the cover. She looked down to the last book. Another favorite - Oh, the Places You'll Go by Dr. Seuss. She didn't remember much about the words, but she did remember Grand-Mére reading the book and telling her that one day they would go to a lot of places.  

"Oh, the places we will go," she would say.

"Like where?" Miranda would ask.

"Like in the pictures I have in the library, and everywhere your heart desires. We'll go to them all," Gran Mere would say.  

"Like to Paris?"

"Oui!  You shall see the small apartment where my family grew up."

"And to the Farm? And ride a tractor and some horses?" Miranda would ask.

"Of course, your Poppa will be very excited to have you see where he grew up," Grand-Mére would exclaim.

And Miranda would look at the pictures in the library of her grandparents' home and lay on the Chase Her and dream about riding camels and seeing elephants. She imagined the bright blue water from a beach with pure white sand. And, she knew her Grand-Mére would take her there.

But then Jackie had returned taking her to different kinds of places; shabby houses and old apartments or trailers. They never stayed in one place for more than a few months. The most they had stayed in one place was during the marriage to Jose. That had lasted a couple of years. Then it was over, and they were moving yet again.  

At least, they'd been in the trailer for a couple of years now, and if they made it through the summer maybe she'd be able to actually go to high school here.  She might be able to make some permanent friends instead of meeting other kids only to say good-bye.  She was getting to the point that she just stopped trying to make friends to avoid the disappointment of moving and leaving again.

She sat back and took a long drink of her lemonade. She stared at the now three piles of books in front of her; two books from when she was a kid, some weird book that Grand-Mére had added, and the two classic books. Bound in leather, they were probably the kind of books you have to read when you go to high school and were probably really boring. She put the book with the bicycle on the cover on top of the leather-bound books and reached for the Dr. Seuss book.

She started reading the pages; smiling at the rhymes and memories of Grand-Mére sitting beside her on the bed reading the words to her.  She remembered the sound of frogs singing up from the pond. She was just reading about flying away in a balloon and "topping all the rest" when, as she turned the page, an envelope fell out of the book. She looked down at the envelope, and in a neat script she could read, "For Miranda."