Maybe it's the weather---it's snowed four times in the last eight days, and although snow usually makes me feel peaceful, so much of it during the week my daffodils usually bloom has my psyche reeling. But it might just be a bit more than grey skies and cold winds that has me feeling depressed. For me, depression isn't about long crying jags; instead it is as if I am turning to stone, as if I can feel nothing. Even my skin feels numb, and my emotions? They are just nothing. Nothing.

Trying to cheer myself up, I binged on a glut of 80s teen flicks like Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club. This usually works a bit, because it serves to remind me that geeky teenagers quite often turn out to be successful adults. Not that I was a geeky adolescent---one day I will blog all about my rebellious teenage years. But I was shy and insecure, unskilled at the girl games and at managing to look perfect as it seemed everyone else did. But this go around of brat-pack therapy did little to cheer me, because it hit me hard---I might have been a weird outsider of an adolescent, but that successful adulthood? Hmmm, just where did that vanish?

It took a bit of serendipity to turn the tide of nothingness. We're getting new windows, and a few minutes before the guy stopped by to give us the bid, I realized that Haley hadn't cleaned her room before she left for school. So I rushed in to clean it (which is something I rarely do these days; I think she's old enough to clean her own room) and I stumbled across one of her Christmas gifts, a boxed set of Madeline L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time quartet. These four books were a staple of my 'tween reading. They tell a few family stories about the Murry family, a pair of brilliant scientists and their children. On the surface, these books are about science, time travel, mythic creatures, and religion in a strange sort of way---religion as one aspect of science, I think. They present a worldview that says hush. Yes, there is evil in the world. But the good is battling the evil and will never stop.

I needed that hush. So I've been rereading these four books. Reading them again as an adult has been my own little bit of time traveling. Many things I have thought about for a long time stem directly from them. Like---think about a place in nature you love. You're sitting there, right now; now, stop to think of how many other people in past ages have also loved that place. And how much time has passed to form it. You start to feel how time is a series of layers, and I think about this whenever I am outside. It is why I want to visit Europe, because it seems that no matter where you stepped there, you would be treading on a place so many other people have lived on. I thought this idea was only my own, but I think it got its seed from L'Engle's books.

But what I needed even more was one of the books' reoccurring themes: the individual matters. The choices YOU make matter and have everlasting consequences. Just one person, or just one tiny bit of cellular matter---matters. Can change things. In my loneliness and sadness, I needed that reminder.  Even though they're Haley's books, I underlined something in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, something that I wanted to remember and that I want her to never forget. One of the characters, Matthew, is speaking to the girl who will soon marry his twin brother, about a book he is writing:

What happens in one time can make a difference in what happens in another time, far more than we realize. . . Nothing, no one, is too small to matter. What you do is going to make a difference.

And that, right there, is why I adore books---not, in the end, because of story or use of language, pacing or theme or even for the escape. I adore books because it seems that knowledge is flung out into the world, and you find bits and pieces of it here and there when you're reading. And sometimes you get lucky and find the bits you need right at the right time, so that by finding knowledge you also find a bit of peace. And your feelings start to work again.