The Girl in the Attic

211. That’s how many books the girl has in her bedroom. So, it seemed strange to hear these words come from her mouth one evening.

“Mama, do you have any books I can read?”

My ten-year-old book-lover has read all 211 books in her carefully organized library. She’s read several of those more than once. Some of them are big enough to simultaneously build arm muscles while exercising the brain and pumping up the imagination.

I had a couple of library books placed on hold for her, but I had yet to pick them up. So, there we were, perusing the other various bookshelves in the house trying to find something that piqued her interest. Mid-quest, she asked me about the box of books in the attic.

There are very few items from my childhood that survived the tumultuous journey of my thirties, but that box of books is one of them. Just like scents and songs can cause distant memories to resurface, books are mini time machines as well. And opening that box transports me straight back to my middle and high school days. 

For one thing, if the nostalgic stories those books contain didn’t transport me, the colorful fashion of the 1990s represented on the covers is flashback-inducing all on its own. I do believe I owned some of those same flamboyant outfits and I definitely had the big-bang hairstyle going on. No, I’m not referring to the theory or the TV show. I’m referring to the hairspray-preserved blonde ski slope that took up residence on my forehead through much of that decade.

Those were the days. The days of scrunchies, chokers, Dream Phone and Mall Madness board games, beanie babies, answering machines, Backstreet Boys, DC Talk, ABC’s TGIF TV shows, Jack and Rose of the Titanic.

And the Christy Miller Series by Robin Jones Gunn.

I wanted to be Christy Miller. When I read those books, I was Christy Miller. And now more than a couple of decades removed from those teen years of California beach scenes with Christy, Todd, Katie, and gang, the stories between the fashionable first edition covers will get to live another life. 

But not quite yet. 

Oh, how the attic is so good at its job. It holds the past and the future. It preserves priceless memories and prepares for future adventures. The hands of a clock stand still up there. Time is not a language the attic speaks. Or perhaps it is effortlessly fluent and understands time even more than we do. 

While I’m excited to share with my daughter the God-honoring stories of faith, love, friendship, adventure, and teen struggles in those books that helped shape my youth, I am not eager for her to grow up. I know that all too soon she will be re-boxing Christy Miller and asking to store the whole gang in the attic for her future daughter to read, as she heads out on adventures of her own. There they will wait alongside a large collection of L.M. Montgomery's works, the original American Girl series, and yearbooks that display the hairstyles of yesteryear in all their glory. They will hang out in the company of journals that tell of miracles. They will rest beside her first Bible that she may carry down the aisle someday, as other women in her family did before her.

In that attic moment, I am reminded that daughters, books, and homes are blessings not to take for granted. And time is a gift not to be wasted, hurried, or denied. Let's be in the here and now. Let's be prepared but present.

Goodness, let’s go ahead and put that lid back on this box, shall we?

No, my dear daughter, we will not be pulling down that box of books just yet. Now, go re-read The Secret Garden, while I hunt for my DC Talk CDs, contemplate cutting bangs, and consider moving the whole family into the attic.

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