There are good librarians and bad librarians, my cousin says.

The library discards the strangest things.  Viragos, for instance. Her boss recently cottoned on to the fact that the fiction librarian was hanging on to the Viragos.  With a few exceptions, they are required to discard a book after five years.

“Next goes Mary Stewart,” says my cousin glumly.

Naturally my cousin saved May Sinclair’s The Three Sisters for me.  This novel, which I read long ago, is loosely based on the lives of the Brontës.  Sinclair also wrote the critical biography, The Three Brontës.

I rode my bike over to my cousin’s house to pick up my Viragos.  She lives way, way out in the suburbs.  In fact it is in a different county.

It is a long bike ride.

We have three seasons here:  There is snow,  there is brown season, and then there is the green.  We have to get out in the green.

My cousin was wearing her old Super Librarian t-shirt, and believe me you don’t want to see it.  She was drinking the biggest cup of Formosa Oolong I’ve ever seen.  (She thought tea would go with Viragos, you see.  We’re very English–ha ha!)

She had a couple of other Viragos for me, too.  One of the best finds was Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve.  I love Carter, and was so saddened by her death of cancer in 1992 that I remember mentioning it at work, to utter silence.

On the way home it rained, and suddenly my jeans began to suds.  Really!  Is it my washing machine, or is it some peculiar form of acid rain?

The constant rain is the down side of green season.