Books That Come Back by Boat

School ends a little after noon and the jetty fills with children. They come down the plank walkways in twos, uniforms still white, shoes in their hands. The water taxis are small and low, painted in colours that have faded in the same order on every hull. I walk down there some afternoons for no reason except the wind.

The children from the water village bring their books back softer than they left. Rain gets into the plastic bag, or the bag is not closed properly, or the book spends an hour under a damp shirt. By Thursday the pages have waves in them and the corners have begun to curl.

Drying a book without baking it

No sun and no iron; both do damage that shows up months later. I stand the book open in front of the fan, interleave the wet pages with blotting paper, change the paper at lunch, and put the whole thing under two dictionaries overnight. The waves come out. The smell takes longer.

A boy in Year Four now carries a zip bag I gave him, and inside that bag is a smaller bag for the book. He explained the system to me at length. I have never seen him without it since.

A book that has been rained on once will outlive the rain.

What the jetty teaches

I am not a patient person by nature; I am patient because I work with paper. On the jetty nobody hurries in the way I am used to. A man mends a net. Two girls do homework on a bench. A boat arrives, someone hands up a bag of mangoes, the boat leaves.

The reading room has the same rhythm, only indoors. Two shelves, a fan, children who come in wet and leave dry. I used to think a library had to be bigger than this to matter. Now I think it only has to be closer than this.

Everything I know about repair I learned from things that were handled too much and survived.

Last Friday I took a book down to the jetty and read four pages, then answered questions about it from a girl waiting for her brother. The book went back on the shelf on Monday with salt on the cover. I wiped it, wrote the date inside, and put it where it belongs.