archival

I've been spending my days down in the basement, digging through my father's old books. I tell everyone it's because it's cooler down there, but really I'm fascinated by all of this material--old books I'd never heard of, their pages yellowed with age, or sometimes utterly pristine, with only a layer of dust to indicate they weren't printed yesterday.

When I find one that's interesting I'll flip through it, see what it's about. Sometimes there will be notes inside--notes he's taken, notes someone left for him when they gave him the book. There were stories there. I wondered if some of these books he'd kept not because of the story in its pages but the story in the margins--those "hope you're wells" and "thinking of you" notes, the highlights that, bereft of context, illustrate nothing.