The Book on the Shelf

How a forgotten book on a shelf opened the door to a lifelong love of poetry.

It was in grade school when I found the book, tucked away on an old wooden shelf in the house I grew up in. The shelf was in my brother’s room, but the books weren’t really his. At least not all of them, and certainly not this one. Many of the books belonged to “the house,” and I suspect this particular one may have been my father’s. Though I still can’t say for certain who it originally belonged to, I remember the look and smell of it clearly: tattered cover, yellowing pages, and that heady scent of old paper and time.

For me, it was Birches. That was my favorite in the collection, a worn volume of Robert Frost’s poems. I was very young then, too young to know who Robert Frost was, and perhaps even too young to know exactly what poetry was. All I knew was that the words were beautiful. They spoke to something deep within me, something I didn’t yet have language for. I too wanted to go by climbing a birch tree, and so I carried the book with me everywhere. Days, weeks, months after finding it on that shelf, we were inseparable. No one ever noticed it had quietly left its place without permission.

I would read and reread the poems until I had memorized lines, even whole verses. I could recite them to myself whenever the book wasn’t close at hand. To this day, Robert Frost remains one of my favorite poets, and Birches is still my favorite poem. The very same book still sits with me now, on a new bookshelf a few towns away from where it once lived. I don’t open it often anymore, it’s more delicate now than it was back then, but it holds its place, safe among other well-loved volumes.

And sometimes, when I grow weary of considerations and life is too much like a pathless wood, I take it down again. I open to Birches and find myself climbing black branches up a snow-white trunk. In that moment, I’m transported, back to that small room with the brown rug, reaching for the book for the first time. That was the beginning of everything. A lifelong love affair with words, thanks to Frost and his birch trees.

After all, Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.