TEA FLOWERS

She was glad to be home, it had been a horrid day. The smell of tea revived her almost as much as the actual brew itself. Thoughtfully, she put her cup down and opened up her book. As dusk slid into darkness, the only sounds in the room were the periodic flipping of pages, like a metronome. A very slow metronome; it took her nearly a minute to absorb each page.
Yet she was a fast reader, compared to many other people.
They merely skimmed where she would drown.
Drinking deep of the printed source.

Partly, that characteristic was her mother's legacy. Mom had tried to make up for lost time, and compulsively amassed a library during her college years, shifting her reading after marriage without slackening the pace, then changing tracks again once the child was born; the same child that now, without compulsion but with equal speed and focus, devoured the lifetime library her mother had left behind.
A vastly multi-faceted book hoard, broad and deep.
Translations, and original languages.
Plus reference books.


Some things the mind cannot digest, she knew that. And a few things it cannot even accept. That is why she had deliberately not taken certain history courses, and had avoided delving into her mothers' past. Besides, her mother had been preoccupied with the onrushing finality of it all in those last few years, and had ambitiously, defiantly, acquired all the books that she herself would never read, but wanted her daughter to eventually open.
It seemed a drawn-out process, but ended far too soon.

When one of them was forty, and the other barely fifteen, the older woman died.


Some things the mind cannot digest; others it can't accept.


The Lady of the Camellias is not suitable for a teenager. Drivel about a prostitute succumbing to tuberculosis while regretting her life, and celebrating her love for a very bourgeois devil -- the priggish narrator recounting events -- can scarce be considered morally uplifting. Yet it was one of the first books she truly loved. Marguerite's passion for Armand, her selflessness in leaving him so as to not ruin his sister's life, and the shattering tragedy of their affair, by turns sent her into fits of hysterical laughter and heartbroken weeping.
She wasn't very good with romance; strange that her mother had also loved this book.

As she reread it, she noticed things that, as a grown-up, and far less febrile than the teenager who had first turned these pages, seemed at once more favourable to the heroine as well as more disturbing.
Dumas was more 'sensitive' than he had at first appeared.

Still, if she had been Marguerite, she would have told Armand's father to go fly a kite. Or something worse. "He's mine, dammit, I saw him first!"

She suppressed a giggle, and poured herself more tea.

Her own father would be home in a while, and he too wanted what was best for his children. Mustn't laugh. Far better to carefully put the book away, and read more tomorrow.
Books about courtesans disquiet parents.
At least, they really should.

Her mother had read this once as a teenager, when it was dangerous to have such literature. It had made her dream, and opened her eyes to societies which were not as repressive, but just as restricted.
"Better starvation than chains." Something her mother said.
She had left, and never looked back.

It seemed cruel that she had had to leave again.

And so young, too!


Her child, now grown up, was infinitely fond of the library the dead woman had left behind. When she opened these books, she heard the characters speak, and at times her mother's voice was among them. What she herself couldn't say, the fragile pages expressed for her.
Each one of these books was precious.




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