As much as I love Rochester, I also love escaping from the long, cold, snowy Rochester winters for a few weeks every year. Who doesn’t like to walk (now I stroll) on  the beach, watch the dolphins, and store up enough sunlight to make it through those cloudy Rochester days when we forget that there even is such a thing as the sun. I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve been doing all of that in Florida while Rochester has been enduring a particularly brutal March.

But, being the book nerd that I am, I also had to spend time at a local book festival and visit a new bookstore that sells both new and used books. If you like the stereotypical old bookstore with sagging, musty armchairs, dusty books on uneven shelves, and a resident cat who may all of a sudden drop onto your shoulders, this shop is not for you.

Hello again books has a very attractive storefront on Main St. in Cocoa Village with a dress fashioned from pages of books in the front window. The inside is bright and airy. You will find other book pages pasted to the floor and some transformed into flowers. Pass through the book arch, and you will find a delightful children’s area with toys. It wasn’t long before I honed in on a cozy mystery by Susan Wittig Albert, one of her series that I hadn’t read yet. Then another book caught my eye. The title JELL-O GIRLS jumped off the shelf at me because it was a book I’d heard of but never got around to buying or reading. It was about the women in a family from LeRoy, New York, the home of Jell-O. It was a book about home. My writing friend Barbara, who was there with me, encouraged me to buy it because she had already read it and enjoyed the story. Not that I needed encouragement. I knew I had to buy it. I was aware of the LeRoy-Jell-O connection. In fact I had written a poem about it for There Are No Buffalo in Buffalo, my book of poems about places in New York State.

How ironic, I thought, to travel 1,000 miles to find a book about home. Then it occurred to me that all good books are about going away and coming home. When we open a book, whether fact or fiction, we are embarking on a journey. That’s the magic of books – to take us away from the normal, from the everyday, and transport us to another world – the world inside the author’s head, which he/she has magically made to appear on the pages in front of us.

Typically, we start off slowly, taking time to get our bearings. Then we read apace for a while until we speed up as we approach the last chapters, our curiosity about the ending overcoming our desire to linger in this new world. At last we return home to unpack from our journey, trying to figure out where this new information, this new way of looking at the world, will meld with our old point of view, not creating a new structure, but maybe shoring up the foundation or airing it out, or giving it a new coat of paint.

I hope you enjoy not only your next trip away, but also your return home.