15 degrees this morning. But the pot atop the woodstove is hissing and rattling. The house is not warm. Nor is it cold. It is certainly not just right. But then I didn’t try to get things warm before bed last night. Too tired or too lazy to bank a good fire. Too cheap to turn the thermostat up.

It has been a cold December.

Last night, I drove the truck down the driveway a hundred yards or so. There’s a big pile of cut wood in the forest about 50 yards from any path my truck could get on. I angled the pickup and aimed the bright lights that way. To get it out, I need to carry the logs piece by piece down the slight slope until I’m about 10 yards from the driveway. Then I can toss it and hope it rolls the rest of the way. It wasn’t easy. I stepped gingerly on the poorly illuminated ground. A rock or a root and I could stumble. But I was careful. I counted the trips to make the time pass and gauge my progress.

“One. Two. Three…”

Ten wasn’t enough, but I was tired from a long day after a long weekend.

“Five more.”

“Five more.”

The pile was still impressive in the remote woodland. It’ll be two weeks of heat. Maybe more. Getting it from the forest to the fire is the difficulty. It is good exercise, I suppose.

“The rest will have to await another night.”

It seems like it is always night this time of year. Though sunrise is near 7:30 and sunset 4:30, it feels like there is no daytime. It is dark when I get home. The dogs need to run and then get their meds. I need to put some wood in the stove. Then it is time to decide what to cook—if you can call it that.

Moving wood is an accomplishment. I did “something.”

Christmas is two weeks away.

I don’t want to get out of bed.

The dogs don’t want to get up either.

A hard night.

Thursday already.

The sun just peeped over the horizon. Its golden light touched my hand typing these words.

My hands are cold. The rest of me beneath the counterpane and cotton and wool is warm. Three old dogs pressed against my flank add a bit, though I think they get more from me than I from them.

Christmas time is coming. I can’t avoid it. I certainly thought things would be much different. But then here I am. Much of it is my own doing.

Why did I reach out to Loreena McKennitt? I listened to “The Lady of Shallot” yesterday afternoon as the day was ending at work. I looked online and found this. I hadn’t heard this version before.

I must enjoy weeping. It has been a week for it. Perhaps it is catharsis. Perhaps making myself a little sadder gladdens me in some way.

“Would you cart up these boxes for me?” I asked Charlie in the warehouse on Sunday afternoon.

When my sister-in-law, Kathryn, told me she was moving from the home on Dolores Street in San Francisco, I asked her to send any family stuff she wasn’t keeping.

“Just box it up, and I’ll send FedEx to come get it. You won’t have to do a thing.”

Thirteen boxes or so arrived just over a year ago. I stuck them in the garage underneath the house til I could get around to them.

I did most of them myself sometime back. Mostly books…

There were four boxes left, and I took them to work so I wouldn’t clutter the house any more than it is already.

“Do these too, please.”

Those were the 8 boxes of the Byron collection won in a poker game in Arkansas maybe 70 years ago. The son, about my age, brought the collection to a high-end rare bookseller in Baltimore. He called me and said, “There’s not enough in there for us. I’m not taking anything out. I think you could get them for…” The son told me the story of his father, an English professor, winning a poker game with another scholar who was short on funds and offering the books to settle the debt. They’d languished for decades with his mother down south. Now “it was time.”

That was weeks ago. I’ve been too busy with the torrents? cascades? avalanches? of books every day to do more than pass by them and think, ‘I really should…’

It is 8 a.m. now. I need to rise, shower, take care of the dogs and go face the books. Again.

There are three mourning doves on the roof outside my bedroom window. They look fat. Softball sized and shaped, fluffed against the cold. It is 28 degrees, and the high will be 34 today.

I put a big log in the fire an hour or so ago. Too big. And it has a branch sticking out the doors. It is too thick to break off with my hands. I shoveled glowing coals beneath in hopes of burning it off so I can close the stove up.

Last night, I carried the last logs across the forest floor to the driveway. It was in cold drizzling rain. At least I finished it. My path was lit by the truck’s brights through the redbud trees’ trunks. A couple of months ago, that part of the forest floor was covered in lime-green fern fronds. I couldn’t trudge through them fifty times or so. They’d be crushed.

Now I can get to the wood cut last winter and seasoned enough to burn through this winter.

The cutting, carrying, loading, stacking and carrying inside to burn is good exercise, I suppose.

Clif just texted me.

“A surprise from Larry this morning.”

Larry texted, “426+12 records+12 media”

The last truckload for the big project will go out today. Unless we get a reorder, the all-consuming enormous purchase will be over. It is not a letdown. 2 months of high-speed innovation was a kind of “high.” But I’m ready to return to reality and focus on holiday sales to satisfy our local and worldwide customers.

I’ll catch up with this story later. The deadline is early tomorrow morning.

It is Friday, December 12th. Twelve days til Christmas. Someone should write a song using that.

The chimney sweep is coming in a couple of hours. This time for real. I’ve opened the dampers on the woodstove. The ashes were taken out and dumped in the little galvanized trashcan. It is full. When I’m sure the ashes are cool, I’ll dump them in a garden. Thus, the firewood gathered here on the mountain runs its last step in returning to the earth.

I cleaned house last night so the chimney guys wouldn’t think I’m a sloppy bachelor hermit. I wonder if they’ll see through my deception. People who do house calls see all kinds of things. I know. I’m one of them. My work has changed though. I’m so swamped with work in the Wonder Book warehouse “sausage factory” that I don’t have time to go out on visits. My loss. There is always a story behind someone’s front door.

Thursday was a complex day. The usual.

I stopped the guys from bringing in Larry’s 400 boxes. It wasn’t going to rain on them.

“Let’s wait til the truck picks up the last load of DD (a.k.a. the big project.) We will have that much more room to squeeze these boxes in.”

We’ve pivoted to getting back to our normal rat race. I go a little crazy if people here are idle. There’s a lot redd up in the building. All the shelves we cleared can be wiped down, and the odd books left on them sorted and sent where they belong.

Projects like going through remainders—mostly purchased for Books by the Foot—were put on hold for the two months we spent chasing seemingly impossible deadlines.

Well, I’m ready for the chimney guys. The dogs are medicated and fed and penned. Things are cleaned up as much as can be. The last coals on the grate in the woodstove are dead. The chimney pipe is just barely warm. Birdseed is tossed into the window feeders and onto the roof.

My buddy Gerry just texted me a photo of The Lady of Shallot from the Tate in London. He couldn’t know she’s being featured in this week’s story.

So, back to last weekend.

I was grinding away at the always insurmountable number of carts laden with books for me to review.

There were some great finds. If you ever look at Instagram, you could see the reels of pictures of finds I’ve made that merit viewing. Not nearly all, mind you. Some, like the first of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, don’t really have eye appeal even though it is a pretty valuable book.

Supply and demand…

I went and checked the carts Charlie filled with the Byron collection and the things my sister-in-law sent from her downsizing over a year ago.

The Baltimore rare bookseller was right. The Byron stuff was problematic. Old sets and “Works of…” and memoirs and… stuff. Mostly with condition problems. There were a few that had been boxed in old-style buckram cover board custom slipcases.

Nice. But not “important.”

The Don Juan with two volumes in publisher’s bindings is likely the highlight.

The stuff from San Francisco was a jumble. I’d sent Tony a couple copies of the textbook my father contributed the cardiology section to.

Also, when he was ailing in a long decline, I’d send him things I thought might amuse. He expressed interest in redwoods, so I’d send him old books and pamphlets about them.

Then I saw a jumble of folders and old papers.

Tony?

Joe?

That’s when he was 18. He “ran away” to join the Marines at Parris Island. A year later, he was at the Naval Academy in Annapolis due to Dad’s intercession.

Jimmie?

A book by Jim?

I’d heard of this but had never seen it.

I was too young to go to his poetry readings at UB (University of Buffalo, now SUNY at Buffalo.) I was told he gave a lecture about James Joyce there. UB acquired all the contents of Joyce’s last apartment. It was quite a literary coup.

It was a mystery to the much younger little brother. Jim was rebelling openly, much to my parents’ discomfiture. Soon, he was to flee to Greenwich Village and become part of the music scene.

I’ve done a few brief searches for a book by James Talmadge Roberts. No results on WorldCat.

But here it was—unless there is another publication. Tony never told me he had one. Maybe it is the only one. The linocuts are each pencil-signed by the artist Jan Thompson and numbered “1/1.”

No, the title page states, “Woodcuts.”

The chimney guys are here. The house is cooling down. They’ll vacuum out the flue and let me know if I’ve let too much creosote build up.

I had the flue lined with a stainless steel one-piece lining. I’d be devastated if the house burned down. I’d be devastated if I burned up.

There’s a newspaper clipping in the back of the book.

Song of a Man in No Man’s Land.

I’ve often had the feeling that an obscure author would know if their work was being read somewhere on earth. Like a little bell going off in heaven or wherever.

“Someone found your book.”

Well, a lifelong mystery solved.

Perhaps.

The family legend was of a book “published,” I thought. But likely this is it.

Then there was a picture of Dad.

Younger than I ever knew him. I was a late surprise to my parents.

The discoveries took my focus away from the present and the stress and life’s disappointments and what I’ll do for dinner tonight. (Almost certainly heat restaurant leftovers or melt something from the freezer.)

I was a little kid with three big brothers and two parents that I looked up to as being impossibly successful. What would I do to prove my worth?

Well, here I am. The end of this generation. I don’t know if I have any surviving cousins. Uncles and aunts were vague persons. Christmas cards. A smoked turkey at Christmas from New Braunfels Smokehouse in Texas. I met them all once or twice as a small child. Then my family fell apart. Dad and Mom died fairly young. They were strangers. Maybe I should have reached out decades ago.

Eventually, I returned to the end of 2025. It was an eventful year. Successes like the Gaithersburg store expansion and renovation. (It is STILL a work in progress.) The business grew in every aspect. The three stores. Online. Book By the Foot.

Even my creation “The Boutique” is finally showing signs that it is being discovered. It is the venue I came up with to “sell the unsellable.”

The beautiful.

The exotic.

The one-of-a-kind.

I see the orders for them since it is my pet project. I chose and priced just about everything listed on it.

They are books that must be seen to be appreciated. The Boutique is their showcase. They’d be “invisible” in online listings. The stores wouldn’t provide an audience large enough.

Here’s one more Loreena McKennitt for you. I finally saw her in concert a few years ago.

That’s about as festive as I can bring myself to this year.

Last night, I loaded some of the wood I’d carried out of the woods in the truck.

And here’s the last truckload of books we sold going out yesterday.

The sweeps are done.

I’ll light a fire before I go. It is a point of pride to not let the furnace run all day.

All the books in the world and a lifetime of pretty good savings, and I still count pennies—even if they won’t make any more of them.

Then down to work.

A lot of new faces in the warehouse. We hired for the big project and to help keep up with sales and all the books coming in. We may be up to about 130 people.

The cycle continues.