Free To A Good Home

Today there are 5 books on programming and design. Softcover tomes, each an inch and a half thick, identical in size, differentiated only by colour schemes. Outdated computer manuals stacked in a leaning tower on top of an overflowing recycling bin pushed to the edge of a perfectly manicured lawn. Sarah is intensely curious about the people who live here. Last week there were two dog eared pulp fiction paperbacks, a Carnegie Mellon course calendar from 2004, a bamboo room divider missing a panel, and an old fishbowl complete with faded coloured pebbles and plastic trees. The week before there were two medical text books and random issues old New Yorkers spanning the last 3 years. Either there's a host of foreign students rotating through in a short term rental situation or the most eclectic, artistically inclined, well read, tech saavy family on the block. It's a non descript semi detached two story barn like house, smack dab in a multi culti family neighbourhood just off the main drag north of Greektown. They throw block parties here, kids play shinny and soccer in the middle of the street. Fat ginger tabbies and a three legged basset hound patrol the lawns. The house kitty corner had a bad fire last summer and the whole street pitched in with the salvage and restoration. Friendly, community minded but separate. So who belongs to the library of diversity and odds and sods that end up regularly discarded like day-olds from a Portuguese bakery? Sarah picked up a book once, a popular self help manual she was too embarrassed to actually buy in public. It was early, before 7 am one morning and she stuffed it surreptitiously into her backpack on top of her sopping wet gym clothes as she slowly jogged home from an early spin class, shoulder checking to make sure no one saw her. That's part of the curiousity for Sarah: people who are comfortable hanging their laundry out in public are far braver than she'll ever be. Here, take my discards, root through my has beens, thumb the pages of once loved novels that someone pored over with passion and intent, wept in, laughed in, underlined, circled, notated in margins then cast out. Take it, make it yours. To be so detached, so willing to let go from something once so desired and well loved. That ease of release. Sharing, moving on, making space to invite new loves in. Sarah yearns for this. Which is why every week she walks by, compelled by the possibility of finding something she didn't know she was looking for.

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