So today I finally did a massive purge of picture books (*sob*) from the Budza's bedroom bookcase, sorted them into box-for-attic, give-to-the-new-parents-next-door, and donate piles, and went up into the attic to search for some novels for Bud.
I pulled down the attic stairs and made my way up to the rows of dusty boxes under the roof--jazz magazines, yearbooks, photo albums, Christmas decorations. And books. Lots and lots of books.
As I opened boxes to try and find the books I had in mind, I could hear the sparrows twittering under the eaves, disturbed by a rare visitor, though they wouldn't in February have nestlings to defend. Sometimes in the summer, when we take down the panels over the vents to allow air to circulate, we find the remains of a nest, and some feathers.
I found some books to begin filling the shelf I'd cleared in the bookcase. I called down to the Budza and my husband and we set up a kind of fire brigade, handing books down the ladder. Soon we had a pile: the rest of my Laura Ingalls Wilder books, Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Great Glass Elevator), various paperbacks of the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander, some Alan Garner fantasies (starting with The Owl Service), some of The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper, and lots and lots of Tintin.
I also brought down The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame and Robert Lawson's Rabbit Hill. The Budza is an animal lover, and given how much he loves small, furry things I think he'll really cotton to the story in Rabbit Hill about the rabbit, Little Georgie, and the rest of the animals of the Hill.
My edition may still include the offending character of the African-American cook, edited out of later editions. I don't remember that part of the book at all, but various websites devoted to the book mention it. So if I read this aloud to Bud, that will have to be a teaching moment.
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