It is Good Friday.

The day, though it carries the same meaning as it has for centuries, doesn’t carry the same weight as it has for centuries. Even in my childhood, its meaning was discussed in public schools. The events of Good Friday over 2000 years ago changed history. Now it is treated as a fringe event. Very few are even aware of it, I think. Had the government not executed Christ and merely jailed or exiled him, what would the world look like today?

But who knows, maybe young people are looking for something to hold on to in these technological, impersonal times.

Alternate histories. Intriguing rabbit holes.

Rabbit holes… Easter bunnies…

The dogs are snoring softly on the bed next to me.

The sun rose a while ago.

Spring is still full of color up here.

It has been a very busy week. My position of juggling the expansion of the Gaithersburg and my regular duties and spring chores on the mountain has meant much more multitasking than usual.

I spent part of the day yesterday in Gaithersburg. The shelving contractor brought down another load of bookcases.

I met with him and Patrick (the amazing store manager) to work on the final major layout. I think the contractor needs to build another 60 or so bookcases to finalize the planned rows. Then there will be a lot of “fill ins” everywhere before all the improvements are done.

New customers are discovering us. We are almost hidden in the quiet courtyard tucked down in a kind of dell behind the bustle of the many international restaurants and other businesses fronting on the very busy thoroughfare that belies its name Shady Grove Road.

I like greeting new customers. You can usually tell they’ve never been in before from the look of “wonder” on their faces.

‘I wonder what on earth this place is?’ would be my guess if I was a mind reader.

One very young man approached me. “Are you the owner?”

“I’m Chuck.”

“I want to thank you for this.” He reached out his hand to shake mine. It was one of those moments that give me tingles. We chatted briefly. He’s been to the Frederick store and is glad at the overhaul of the Gaithersburg store.

I thanked him for reaching out. “It means a lot.”

And it does. I tend to work with blinders on, unaware of the hundreds of people who visit the three stores every day and the thousands that we ship books and other “physical media” to every day.

When I make my way through the warehouse and see the 60 or so people engaged in their tasks there, I often note how many are wearing Wonder Book t-shirts. (You can now order t-shirts online. {https://www.wonderbk.com/shop/collectors-corner/special-collections-author-archives/wonder-book-merchandise?sort=received_at%7Cdesc} More styles will be coming soon.) All the stores have many styles, sizes and colors.

(Poor Pip is coughing and gasping. He just had his morning meds—pills pushed into a little ball of liverwurst. He’s in good spirits but in decline. Maybe I should try a fifth vet and see if there’s an answer others have missed. My little Jack Russell companion has been king of the mountain for 14 years.)

Seven pallets of the same book arrived yesterday. They were shipped to us gratis from Mexico via Texas.

The owner and producer of the books wanted them to find a good home. It is a massive slipcased book produced in Florence with Prada.

It is huge!

What will we do with them?

Another truckload of remainders is due today. Maybe 50,000 books.

My passion is the singular books, however. The unusual or unique—not necessarily valuable but intriguing to whatever part of my brain is stimulated by such things.

This week has had an Asian theme among the thousands of threads that make up the tapestry here.

Someday, we will be able to do a better job with all the incomprehensible foreign language books that drop in here. Technology will see to that.

These particular books had the assistance of bilingual texts.

This Tao Te Ching is printed on silk pages.

These poetry books are in English as well as Chinese.

This little gem arrived with some Lafcadio Hearn (2 were in 19th century dust jackets!)

Yes. Today will be a full day.

We will send at least one van to each of the three stores.

At Gaithersburg, all the technology at our sales counters will be moved to the new sales counter.

I’ll be spinning around the warehouse after this story gets sent off. It is kind of like spinning a yarn but mostly true. I wonder if I should learn to knit?

It will be a race to get to 4:30 or 5 when the workday ends.

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Easter week 2025.

Today is Holy Monday.

It was about a year ago I was in Milan and saw The Last Supper.

I need to travel again. Working 7 days a week is not healthy, I think.

Today it will get to nearly 70 degrees. The forecast the next 10 days with highs in the 60s and 70s and lows in the 40s and 50s. Is it safe to begin taking the plants outside?

So much to do in the gardens. Last week there was rain most days. Saturday and Sunday, I did my usual weekend workout with cartloads of books.

I made progress!!

It felt good sorting through carts that have been impeding my progress for months.

I did this at the expense of human contact. Also probably not healthy, I think.

There just was no one I was interested in reaching out to. (No one reached out to me either.)

Tomorrow is April 15th. Tax day. A different kind of holy day fraught with meaning. The accountant wants me to visit today with several blank checks. I can’t imagine why.

The 15th is also the day my brother Tony passed away in 2021. He had a love-hate relationship with taxes. He volunteered late in life to help elderly or challenged people do their taxes.

I miss him. Even though we were often estranged—he could be very weird about politics and stuff—we had a closeness, a sibling bond going back to the very beginning.

For my part, I didn’t treat him very well at times. But that was mostly a defensive reaction to his parries.

I miss him nearly every day. Maybe every day. He was the last of my three big brothers.

I do have a niece and some nephews that are nearly my age, but they are weird and not really the same as the brothers whom I could call—especially in the long-ago times—and have a real conversation.

Oh well…

Death is something you can’t control. After someone passes, you cannot mend things—except in prayer and contrition.

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I haven’t written about March!

Boom!

Everything was up compared to March 2024.

How long will this wave last? It’s been 5 years since COVID and the remarkable renaissance the brick and mortar stores have had since we reopened after the state shut us down.

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The bleeding hearts are up everywhere. I need to do some transplanting.

I need to do a LOT of transplanting.

It is good work. Working with my hands on rocks and soil and plants and books.

Maybe it is good that my job ain’t too cerebral.

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Holy Monday

Back from the accountant. How much does a pound of flesh weigh? Are there tax cuts coming? Who knows?

As my now retired doctor and good friend told me long ago when I was bitten by a poisonous spider and there was no treatment for it, “It will either get better over it won’t.”

The personal check I wrote was shocking. My aging vehicles will just have to do for a while longer.

Then to Walmart for a prescription. I’ve been working so much I haven’t had time to pick it up. I’m running out of a lot of things at home.

Water, for instance. My well is fine, and that water is sweet. But I’ve developed a taste for canned fizzy water. I stopped the diet sodas years ago. I like the way the carbonation scours my mouth and gullet. And the bubbles in my gut seem to give comfort after the little burp.

Back to the warehouse and immediately on the road with Andrew driving us to Gaithersburg. I want to see the progress there.

(Oh! I bought a 15-pound frozen turkey too. On sale for 88 cents a pound. The dogs and I will all be happy.)

This should be another big week there. The last big order of bookcases may be coming in. A bookseller loves bookcases—especially new ones. Except when they are empty. An empty bookcase exerts an unnatural force. The world is out of balance. Nature abhors a void. A bookseller abhors an empty shelf.

It is a beautiful day. The redbuds still light up the roadsides. At home, there are still thousands of daffodils blooming. We are getting toward the end of midseason. I must put stakes in where I want to plant more bulbs for 2026.

2026. Seems so far in the future.

Every sign of the current daffodils will have been reabsorbed back into the earth by fall. You wouldn’t think it looking at the barren forest floor in the winter, but there are billions of organisms alive underground. Not just plants and flower bulbs. Millions of earthworms eagerly consume any dead plant material. That’s what happens to the billions of leaves that turn brown and dry and fall in the fall. It all gets recycled, so the next cycle of growth will have nourishment.

The forest canopy is greening as well. Soon, I won’t be able to look upward and see the sky in many places.

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Wow!

The store looks wonderful.

Ummm… WONDER-ful.

So many categories have been moved and expanded. I’m especially proud of the transformation of the kids’ section. It is so much larger. There’s a big 5 for $5 section. We have a small wall of “premium” kids—not expensive—but new arrivals of exciting recent titles.

The philosophy and religion sections have been put together. I hope there won’t be a holy war.

All the work. It makes me tired just looking at it.

Will this be my masterpiece?

It is a terrible location, but if you build a better mousetrap…

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Does spring always fly by so fast? It must. But this year feels different.

Maybe I think that every year.

The dogwoods are opening!

NO!!!

Not already.

Wait awhile.

I don’t want spring to end.

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When I opened the side door to go out, there was a chickadee standing on the doormat. Chickadees are kind of “friendly.” This one didn’t seem to want to fly away. I notice his tiny beak was filled with white strands. Dog hairs it had plucked from the rough mat. The dogs like to scratch their backs on it.

Dog hair—the bane of my housekeeping. I think I’ll get Giles shaved when it gets warmer. When I pre-vacuumed for the housekeeper yesterday, the clear plastic box that this machine uses was stuffed with dog hair sucked up from the oriental carpets. I took it outside and shook its contents into a bed near the house. I think the scent might help deter deer approaching the house. I’m sure it is a kind of fertilizer too. It will disintegrate in a few weeks.

The chickadee was using dog hair to build its nest. I’d like to see that. But I have no idea where they roost. I don’t see them flitting in and out of the two dozen or so birdhouses I have installed.

I should open the doors and let them come inside and clean the dog hair off surfaces I can’t vacuum.

I avoid dark clothing. It makes me look like a sad “dog person” (as opposed to a “cat lady.”)

That makes me think of the university library I visited in Portugal. It lets bats in at night to eat insects—supposedly to protect the books. (Horizontal surfaces have covers for the poop.) In 2025, I’m sure there are more effective ways to protect books. But it brings in tourists, I suppose.

Ernest and I are driving to the Frederick store. I haven’t been there for weeks. Mostly because the Gaithersburg store has been taking all my attention.

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Thursday

It will get up to 60. Stunningly beautiful spring day.

Ernest is driving us to Gaithersburg. Another big load of bookcases is going down today as well.

The Wonder Whirlwind has me spinning dizzyingly. (Is that a word?)

On the mountain, spring has completely supplanted winter. The gloves and scarves and knit hats have made their way downstairs into the cedar closet. I’ve just begun to take the potted plants outside.

In winter, it is prudent to bring wood in every time you come inside and have hands free.

Now every time I go out, I carry a potted plant.

It got down to 38 last night. I had a small fire in the stove. I’m trying to use up all the scraps piled in the driveway outside the door.

And plants are emerging everywhere.

I just planted these prairie trilliums last year. They’re doing so well. But they are ugly.

I wish the other trilliums I’ve planted or propagated would be as vigorous. There are a lot of red ones in many beds now. I think they may be native ones that appeared as one or two and I nurtured so seeds had soft soil to germinate in. I’ve gently transplanted offspring over the past 6 or 7 years. Their flowers seem smaller though.

Today, after rushing into the warehouse and checking around for projects, I found myself standing stupefied.

“What should I do next?”

Breathless. Confused.

Well, at the Gaithersburg store, there was no such dilemma. My two hours there were booked with the landlord and the shelving contractor and the store manager and my own strained creativity.

We currently have the luxury of seemingly infinite shelving. Limitless choices for expansion and layout.

I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Too much.

Too much…

So I did what I so rarely do. Asked for opinions.

If all goes well, we will have a new entrance tomorrow. Customers will come in alongside the new sales counter. It is four times the size of the old one. On the other side of the counter, there will be an exit door! A first here! Big time!

Now let me spin a yarn…

A few months ago, we collected a lot of brand-new yarn from an estate. A LOT of yarn.

A yarn horde. Sounds Scandinavian. “Yarnehoorda.”

Seems so often we get too much of a good thing. (Too much of many good things?)

Usually it is because no one else wants the stuff.

Then we get creative and try to figure out what to do with it.

What to do with miles and miles of alpaca, merino, wool, cashmere, acrylic, sockenwolle… yarn?

Sockenwolle? That is Scandinavian… or German.

There’s lots of traffic on 270 going back to Frederick. It is only 2:30. Are lots of people quitting work early and heading home? Maybe it is an early week for many who are heading to relatives for Easter.

I asked a person who I know is into crafts to help price the wool. I imagine the acrylic is cheap and the alpaca expensive.

How cheap?

How expensive?

We brainstormed and ultimately brought a laptop to the first pallet—there are three pallets piled high with boxes and tubs filled with skeins of yarn. She could then search and see what the varieties retail for.

Attention knitters: Yarn is coming to a Wonder Book near you.

I picked up the framed Map to Fairyland. It is huge. Over 4 feet wide.

I’d like to visit there. Maybe I will in these stories. I just need inspiration. Where did it go?

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Venus was rising in the predawn sky this morning.

The universe is so enormous. My universe seems to be a book warehouse and patch off mountain land.

Two beautiful sets came in this week.

Poe seems to be eternal.

The Oz facsimiles are stunningly beautiful. Baum used to be highly sought after. Now not so much.

What happens when certain books go out of style?

We take them in regardless and try to figure out something…

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And the dogtooth violets (trout lilies) are up!

I’ve planted a lot of them in various spots, and I’m heartened at their success.

I hope they propagate and flash their beauty all around the property.