Miss Chrissy and The Man have a vast and varied library. There are so many volumes, it has taken us Whimsies this long to just go through and read all the titles on the book spines! Well…truth be told, as we’ve been making our attempt to read just the titles, we’ve gotten distracted many times, stopping to read a novel (or two…), or simply turn pages, looking at pretty pictures. Well, I am here to report that today is a momentous day! I have at last come to the end of the very last bottom shelf, and now I sit back on my rear, thinking…”My goodness! What a vast and varied library!”
Before I get to the good stuff, let me first mention that there are plenty of titles in this library that don’t interest us Whimsies at all. For instance, The Man is a Big Fan of Horror Movies, which don’t really appeal to us that much (except a little bit, at Halloween), so we really have no desire to look past the titles. But believe me, there are plenty of books about horror movies!
Also, Miss Chrissy has quite a number of cookbooks, but since we Whimsies don’t eat…much…we really don’t care about recipes for crockpots, or What to Do with Vegetables. She does have one or two beautiful books about Christmas treats, and we’ll probably share those with you someday soon, but for right now, it’s been my goal to pick out two books that show exactly how varied this library is.
So here is what I came up with. First, let’s take a look at Dulac’s the Snow Queen and Other Stories by Hans Christian Anderson. Well, we all know who Hans Christian Anderson is! He’s one of the main writers of what we generally think of as “fairy tales.” And this book is full of fairy tales! The Snow Queen, the Little Mermaid, and The Emperor’s New Clothes are just a few. The words belong to Mr. Anderson, 
but the pictures are all by Edmund Dulac, who is this artist who draws simply beautiful pictures in very much a “fairy tale style.”
Just take a look at some of these gorgeous pictures! They’re so quaint, and yet also so…ethereal. I didn’t know what “ethereal” meant, but Tillie suggested the word, which she learned from Jennifer, who learned it from her Professor parents. It means delicate…eerie…otherworldly. And this IS otherworldly, because when you read these stories and look at these pictures, you go directly to this other world, which is so unlike our own. At least for a little while, until you pick your head up from the book and stop reading.
And when you pick your head up, if you happen to glance over just a shelf or two, you’re likely to find this book in your field of vision—(and now for something completely different!)—Solve It With Salt, by Patty Moosbrugger.
***Tee hee***
Sorry. But I can’t help laughing at that author’s name. When I first saw it, I read it as Mooseburger. Haha! Could you imagine having a name like Mooseburger? I bet any kid who had to grow up with a name like that would get teased a lot in school. Getting teased so much, that kid might go home and cry and mope, but when they’re older, they might buy a gun and go back to school and shoot everyone who ever made a joke about their name. Brrrrr…it’s scary! And it makes me glad that I never had to go to school, because when you think of it, school could be a pretty scary place, with all those crazy people running around doing whatever the heck they want.
On the other hand, our imaginary Mooseburger kid might simply shake it off and join in the laughter, and then they would actually be pretty popular with all the other kids, and when they get older they would join a rock band, and everyone would come to their concerts, and the name of the band would be Mooseburger, and they would throw out mooseburgers to the audience during intermission. Well, they might only be little $1 hamburgers from McDonald’s because I’m not really sure where you would actually get real mooseburgers. Miss Chrissy likes to watch that show about people who move to Alaska, and from that she has learned and shared with me that you can’t actually BUY moose meat, you have 
to go out and kill the moose yourself if you want to make a mooseburger. Or, you have to know someone who’s a hunter and likes to hunt moose, and doesn’t mind sharing their moose meat with you. I mean, you would probably have to be very good friends with someone if you wanted them to share their moosemeat with you.
But I digress…
Getting back to this lovely little volume about what you can do with salt, we read here on the cover that you can relive dry skin, clear sinuses, eliminate odors, polish copper and brass, etc. etc. etc. I don’t really have a lot of those problems, since my skin is never dry, and my sinuses are fine, and I don’t own any copper or brass. But my ears perked up when I read that salt can remove odors.
You see, there’s a section in here about smelly shoes. As you know, we recently got a whole bunch of new shoes from the Ebay Boutique, but they are all second hand, and one of the pairs in particular (I won’t tell you which, because I wouldn’t want the shoes to feel embarrassed…) have a bit of an odor to them. Miss Chrissy put a little baking powder inside them for a couple of days, and that helped somewhat, but now I’m wondering if maybe she should have used salt instead!
Well, it’s certainly worth a try, isn’t it? I mean, salt is so plentiful and so inexpensive, why not? In fact, reading some more in this book, I’ve decided that if we ever plant a garden, I’m going to remember that we can use salt to prevent cabbage, worms, kill slugs, and relieve any beestings we might get, working in the great outdoors.
So there you have it! Everything from fairy princesses to slugs. In the Library, you can travel to enchanted underwater kingdoms, then discover a salty recipe to relieve any jellyfish stings you might get in that world of enchantment. In the Library, the fantastical meets the practical, time after time. You never know what you’re going to find next.
Oh! One more thing, which I didn’t even realized until I wrote this entire post: Not only is there a “Moose” reference on the cover of the Salt book, but there is also an actual MOOSE on the cover of the fairy tale book! How weird is that? Not planned that way at all, I just pulled two random books from the shelf, supposedly as unalike as possible, and yet…so very alike in this one particular way.
Woooo-OOOOOO-ooooooo! Yeah, life is like that sometimes.
