First Published BuffaloVibe   •   December 5, 2016 • Edited in Remembrance of Julie

Julie died years ago. Today is her birthday. I store a bright blue book in that hollow space where my grief resides. I found this book in my Little Free Library—a portal—that let her ghost slip through.

Let me explain.

For my birthday one year, my husband built a Little Free Library in our front garden along the sidewalk. “Take a book, return a book,” that’s the deal. He pounded the first one into the ground one spring, and when a Buffalo winter destroyed it a few years later, he built another. Book swaps aren’t new, but since 2009, the Little Free Library program has helped them pop up everywhere (over 40,000 worldwide). I registered mine, got a snazzy sign, and even paid extra for a quote from Stephen King: “Books are uniquely portable magic.” I said yes to the pun on “portable” and “portal.”

One summer evening under the street light, I was puttering around, tidying the shelves—just a jumble of kids books and used paperbacks—when I discovered a band-spanking new hardback: Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography by Laura Ingalls Wilder, thick with commentary and never-before-published details. I clutched it in both hands and felt a jolt. Not long before she died, Julie had slipped me a newspaper clipping announcing this very book.

She and I weren’t blood relatives. She was married to my uncle for years, then divorced—hence “shirt-tail,” the sort of relation that is and then isn’t. But Julie was my shirt-tail aunt, my friend, a pioneer spirit. I first met her in Northern California at the end of a logging road, where she, my uncle, my dad, and his partner built off-grid cabins. During school breaks, my brother and I stayed with our father—skipping down a well-worn path through the woods to split firewood or shovel out a fruit cellar with my uncle and our newly minted aunt. Julie would fry up baloney on the woodstove and roll her own cigarettes from a yellow tin, dealing me a hand of 500 Rummy. At the same time, my dad and uncle hammered away at their grand dreams. No electricity, no running water, a cabin in the woods—and she made it feel like home.

After she delivered her baby at my mom’s house, she and my uncle packed up and moved back to Buffalo to raise their daughter “on the grid.” A decade later, they tried a grape farm, then divorced. For years, we’d lose track of each other; then she’d pop back into my life. She and my cousin moved to Seattle when my mom and I were there, and later, she decided to return to Buffalo. Julie’s the reason I ended up here. At the time, my father and Nana were visiting me in Seattle, and Julie needed someone to travel back with her—so she bought me a plane ticket to bring Nana home. Once I arrived, I never left.

Some people in your life feel tangential, “shirt-tail,” yet they keep finding new ways to bring you back home.

Julie died from cancer. The news staggered me. I unearthed that old clipping about Pioneer Girl, realizing I’d never bought the book or followed up.

So, the day I tugged that pristine copy out of my Little Free Library, I recognized it for what it was: proof that our story continued. It felt as though Julie had come strolling down my street, peered through the window, and slid the book inside before the wind swept her away.

Time Travel. That’s how it felt—like I’d stepped through a secret passage back to that cabin in California, feeding the woodstove, chasing Charlie the cat, flipping cards. The older I get, the more I believe the universe crackles now and then with gifts like these.

Sure, it’s probably random. But as I stood on the sidewalk, hugging that book in the late evening, I realized these Little Free Libraries are portals to never-ending stories. Sooner or later, we discover our stories intertwine—sometimes proving we never lose the people we love as each new chapter unfolds.

I have this new memory of us: me skipping down the dirt path to find her on the porch of her cabin, calling out, “Look what showed up!” She’d strike a match, light her rolled cigarette, laugh, and then hand me another clipping.

I found her again, in that little box in my garden. And as long as there are books crossing thresholds, it’s true: “Books are uniquely portable magic.”