The Value of Paper

Ella was always searching—searching for the tangible to find the intangible.

She was an unmoored ship, hoping that her love for history and antiquing would somehow be the North Star she needed to find a solid dock in the world.

Every Saturday morning, Ella went to an antique shop, a yard sale, or the take-it-or-leave-it area at the dump, looking for treasures that would provide avenues to escape into different worlds, different times, and different lives.

The abandoned relics she shopped for held mysteries of lives she stitched together, building an imaginary family.

She liked to pretend that she was a liaison, salvaging and returning long-lost treasure to their rightful owners, saving the memories before they became forgotten whispers.

Of course, she never actually tracked down an owner, but it was a mental game of creative whimsy she liked to play.

One Saturday morning, Ella awoke buzzing with excitement. 

She was heading to an antique store in the neighboring town she’d heard about from a coworker.

The smell of lilacs dripping in dew greeted her as she walked to the bus stop. 

She rubbed her arms and danced in place waiting for the bus, shaking off the early morning chill. 

Once on the bus, she took a seat in the back, admiring the colorful blooms of pink and white dogwood trees through the smudged window.

A new antique store is the embodiment of spring—a bevy of possibilities, an awakening, a festival for the senses.

After getting off at her stop, Ella quickly found the antique shop. Its weathered sign and charming shutters distinguished it from the surrounding businesses, which all sported much more corporate—if not sterile—facades.

A charming bell jangled as Ella stepped inside. She was greeted by a symphony of aromas—aged paper mingling with the hints of lavender sachets, earthy cedar and sandalwood, citrusy furniture polish, and oil paint.

The walls were lined with worn shelves that groaned beneath the weight of crowded layers of decorative vases, porcelain lamps, and vintage sewing kits. 

Everything was covered in a fuzzy blanket of dust. More flecks hung in the air like suspended glitter.

Nestled away in a shadowy corner, Ella spotted a wooden box adorned with intricate carvings.

She gently unlatched the tarnished clasp and lifted the splintering lid, unveiling a jumble of trinkets.

There was a tiny porcelain doll missing one arm, a silver thimble scarred with imprints of countless stitches, a delicate brass locket, and a thick coffee-stained yellow envelope.

Ella's fingers traced the smooth surface of the doll's face, her mind generating questions in spiraling combinations like images dancing around the axle of a slot machine wheel.

Did the doll’s soul remember the little girl who once fluffed her layered petticoats and stared lovingly into her blinking glass eyes with the adoration of a mother?

What had happened to her arm? 

Was it pulled off by a jealous younger brother who callously ignored the echoes of pain that ricocheted from the now-haunting porcelain face to his own sister’s soft complexion? 

Looking at the doll’s matted head, Ella wondered if the doll remembered the days when her pigtails were still bouncy ringlets of shiny auburn hair.

Ella gave the doll’s body a gentle squeeze.

I would’ve never abandoned you. I will never abandon you.

Ella tucked the doll back in the box and picked up the locket, its intricate filigree shimmering in the dim light.

She had never had a necklace, certainly never a locket. There’d be no one’s picture to put in it, but she always loved miniatures so the idea of a teeny tiny picture that told a meaningful story to the owner seemed enchanting.

This locket was not heart-shaped, but oblong, with ornate metalwork. Its aged patina was like a cloak of modesty, hiding its lustrous shimmer.

Inside, was a tiny sepia portrait of a young woman with piercing eyes, tumbling curls that framed her face, and a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes but felt warm nonetheless.

Ella wondered who the young woman was. 

The lover of the doll? 

She gently draped the kinked chain around the pendant and nestled the locket amidst a pillow of amber velvet lining the box. 

Ella rifled through the other knick knacks lying on top of the envelope, but she was most curious to dig into the envelope.

It seemed out of place. 

She’d found plenty of old letters and postcards over the years. She particularly liked looking up the history of the old stamps to try and date unmarked correspondences.

But this envelope clearly had never been mailed.

There was no stamp, no address, no inky postmark smears.

It also wasn’t a regular white envelope, but rather one of the oversized golden ones with the brad fastener closure.

This envelope was also quite thick, more along the lines of a dense report or a short book.

It wasn’t that uncommon for Ella to find old leather-bound journals and she’d come across dozens of vintage cookbooks and recipe cards.

But when she unearthed the envelope from the box, it didn’t immediately feel like it contained any sort of thin paperback book or journal. 

Ella carefully undid the fastener, but the aged metal prongs snapped right off.

The adhesive on the flap had dried with age, so the flap sprung loose.

Ella slid out a stack of papers folded in half.

The seam ached and cracked as Ella parted the halves, deepening a once youthful groove. 

The yellowed pages were filled with faded ink. A few age spots —perhaps coffee spills or errant water droplets—had wrinkled some of the paper and caused a hemorrhage of some of the words.

It appeared that the pages held some sort of manuscript, perhaps the start of a novel, maybe a memoir, or some sort of adventure tale. 

The dim lighting in the cavernous antique shop made it that much harder to read the printed words ravished by time.

Ella smiled, remembering how much she used to love meandering through the labyrinth of shelves in a library, scanning the spines of books as if she were a seafarer on a quest to find unexplored land. 

Each unread book felt like the tactile representation of hope—a possibility to learn more about the world, more about people who never existed but were brought to life by their authors, and more about herself. 

She closed the lid and clutched the box in both hands as if it were a fragile basket of fresh eggs.

“How much is this?”

An elderly man standing at the counter looked up from his newspaper, thin bifocals balancing low on his nose.

He pushed the lenses towards his eyes as he righted his posture.

“Oh, hello there!. I haven’t seen you here before.”

His croaked voice spoke of a man who likely smoked a pipe most of his life.

“Yes. This is my first time here.”

“Did you find everything you were looking for?“

Ella pivoted her head, scanning the exquisite carvings on the lacquered legs of a mahogany table and the delicate brushstrokes peppering the canvas of a faded painting hanging askew on the wall.

She turned back to the man.

“Truthfully, I could spend hours picking through every delightful nook and cranny of your shop, but I always limit myself to just one piece.” She flushed at the confession. “I can always come back next week!”

“I hope you do, young lady. I'll tell you what. How about I give you 50% off today since you’re a first-time customer? You clearly have a distinguished taste.”

“What a lovely gesture. I’d heard great things about your shop and this visit has exceeded my expectations.“

“You’re too kind.“

That night, Ella tried to decipher the manuscript, seeing if it held secrets to help unravel the riddles hidden in her new collection of someone else’s history, or contained passages that she recognized from what eventually became a best-selling novel.

The manuscript seemed to be a diary of sorts.

Its passages wove together vignettes of a girl’s daily experiences: fancy dinner parties, wearing gowns sewn by her mother, and missing her “Papa“ who was at war but having the best “Mama,” as well as three older brothers and a baby sister. 

Ella pieced together the life of a girl with a very different life than her own, both in terms of the quotidian tasks, and also the sense of belonging, love, and community.

Ella had never sat at the same kitchen table for more than eight months growing up; she was always shuffled from home to home like discarded clothing someone outgrew. 

She never met her Papa, and never had anyone to call “Mama.” There were almost always other “brothers” and “sisters” but not by blood, and never the same ones for very long. 

Reading the stream of consciousness loosely organized into entries separated by break lines transported Ella into an elusive world, and provided the same comfort she invariably got from reading. 

Libraries had always been her sanctuary. 

No matter how many times she moved, or how isolated she felt in a foster home, as long as she could get her hands on a book, Ella could be temporarily free.

Another thing that Ella loved about libraries was the feeling of consistency.

Sure, the layout of the library in each town was different, but they all had that same delicious smell: aged paper, oaky wood, and musty newspapers.

For Ella, the smell of a library was like sunshine for a withering plant.

No matter how empty and disconnected she felt, when she stepped into a library and drank in its familiar aroma, Ella felt alive, rejuvenated, and human. 

And then there were the librarians—Ella’s secret favorite part of visiting any library.

Of course, like the libraries themselves, each librarian was a unique individual but every librarian Ella encountered shared that ephemeral quality of making each patron feel welcome, special, and connected.

Ella marveled at how librarians always made her feel cared for, even when she was visiting for the first time in a new town.

Sometimes, when she felt particularly dejected or alone, Ella went to the library simply because the librarians provided a motherly warmth to fill her void.

Ella set the manuscript aside, the folded pages audibly crackling at the worn fold.

She readied herself for bed, feeling a sense of comfort that had eluded her for several years. She wasn’t sure exactly what it was, though she welcomed the foreign feeling.

Ella opened her Libby app to read a few more pages of the latest Debbie Macomber book.

However, within seconds, her eyes ached from the glow of the screen. The sensation surprised Ella since reading her ebooks had been her beloved nightly ritual for the past several years.

Like antiquing, reading stories helped Ella escape into other lives. The characters in her books felt like real friends. Their adventures felt like her experiences. Their lives felt aspirational. 

Maybe I’ve just done too much reading today.

She set her phone aside, somewhat saddened she wouldn’t be whisked away to the charming Alaskan town preparing for Christmas, and mostly disappointed that she would be stuck with her own thoughts while waiting for sleep to come.

But, surprisingly instead of ruminating over usual worries—the spreadsheets and databases she encounters at work, the water bill that’s past due, or the fact that she has no one to say good night to—Ella thought about the antique shop, the manuscript, the feeling of connection. She also thought about the confusing aching in her eyes when trying to read her ebook.

It suddenly dawned on her that she had cut herself off from the only place that ever felt like home. 

The paper manuscript was a physical book of sorts that whisked her away into a story about a family. 

It simultaneously reminded her of the sense of community, connection, acceptance, and familiarity she always felt in a library, even when she had to use a map to get to it.

Because she had shifted to exclusively downloading ebooks, she had not stepped foot in an actual library for years.

This meant that had deprived herself of her grounding elixir, the ineffable hug she only could get inside the walls of a library.

Ella’s limbs melted into the mattress as a sensation of deep relaxation enveloped her. 

She would find her library card in the morning. It was time to visit home.