Last night I threw two granola bars, my meter, my phone, a wallet, a pen, my writer's notebook and the book I am supposed to have finished for Tuesday's class into a totebag and drove off into the summer dark towards Barnes and Noble. You see, I wished to witness a Harry Potter midnight release party at least once before the series ended. This also would be my son's first release. Last month I reserved a copy of the book for me, and one for him. I have always intended to begin accumulating books to be held in trust for him. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince would be the first such book I purchased.

To get one's books you first had to check in and submit to being banded. Two bands = permission to pay for two books after midnight. My original intent was to get the bands, go home and watch the season premier of Fargate, and then return in time to bring my son to the end of the release party.

So, that was the original plan. I did manage to get a parking spot at Barnes and Noble, and from there I could tell I was a complete rookie when it came to midnight release parties. There were pre-teens camped out on stadium blankets playing cards. There was a particularly persistent clutch of nine year old boys attempting to fling curses and hexes at each other. There were many tall, pointed black hats, black capes, and one memorable young woman dressed as Moaning Myrtle, complete with an actual toilet seat hung around her neck. There were a damn lot of people in the parking lot (entrance to the store was rationed per fire code restrictions). With your bracelets you got a map that told you which LINE you would get into at 11 pm.

Really, I stayed because I doubted I'd find a parking spot sooner, and there were people already in their 11pm lines when I arrived at 8:40pm. I paid my dues in the "wait to just get into the store line", reading the book due on Tuesday and trying not to listen too closely to the 4 fifteen year olds in front of me. They were in their sarcastic mock things phase, but it was fueled more by the exhuberence that comes with the age than a "so what" mentality and I found them to be more tolerable than I would have imagined. Eventually I made it into the building, purchased Carpe Diem, a book about a soccer-mom demon hunter, as a guard against boredom, and got myself a diet pepsi. Ah yes, I made use of the facilities whilst there was still toilet paper.

I retreated to my car, listening to music, reading my text book, and taking the occasional pull of soda. All in all, I wasn't having a bad time. I was alone amongst a thousand people, all of whom had figured out they should go with friends. It was muggy and there was one clearly immortal mosquito inside my car. Didn't really care, although in general I'm not a happy woman in a gathering larger than, say, eight. There was a vibe, an energy, a sense of common purpose that made anything that happened simply part of the experience. Really, how often do we get to be in one place with a thousand other people who are just as exited to read something as you are?

Got in my line at 10:50. Gave up on the text as I needed to have something meaningful to say and there was just too much people watching to do to concentrate. Began Carpe Diem. HP went on sale at 12:01. I was in the car with my two books, green rubber commerative bracelets, poster, and HP glasses (all procured in the last five minutes of my wait) by 12:26. I was in bed and reading by 12:35. Mild shock some two hundred pages into the book when the cat appeared with yet ANOTHER length of craft ribbon hanging from the output end of her digestive system.

After dealing quickly with the cat, I returned to my book. HP 6 went down like honey. The tiresome shouting and angst of the fifth book was gone. This book was clearly going to be "domestic" in that no big event was going to happen that year (well, scheduled, anyway) and most of the story was centered at Hogwarts. I didn't find HP 5 particularly satisfying, but I loved drawing back and savoring the experience of reading and being aware of reading this book.

In the end, I gave up when the sky was beginning to lighten and the dawn birds had begun to sing. Some sleep, a morning spent with my mother, and then I returned to my book, this time downstairs and on the couch, late in the afternoon. I finished just before 7pm. Since book 3 I have always completed them within 24 hours.

So, I cried a bit around quarter to six. It is exceptionally rare for me to cry in general, but I can't even think of the last book that made me cry. I choked up when Harry began shouting for Sirius in the last book and I didn't see Sirius's death coming at all, but I never cried. I'm no longer in a depressed state of mind; trying to compose a coherent description of the bizarre calm and order at Barnes and Noble helped tame the depression. Upon completing the end of The Amber Spyglass I was fairly profoundly quieted and on occasion depressed for over a week. Didn't cry then, all though I do whenever I hear Will and Lyra speaking with each other at the park bench, either on tape or when I watch the National Theatre production clips online. Perhaps, though, the differences between Harry Potter and His Dark Materials ought to be a separate post.

So, I am down to one last Harry Potter Book. My son will be two or three, I expect, when the last book arrives. I will bring him to the release party so that he may say he was there and because there was nothing like this when I was growing up. There were no world-wide releases, no internet to feed your addiction in between books. The passion you felt for a book back then was usually solitary and unwitnessed. I am glad that midnight releases and parties and countdowns on websites have started in time for my son to always have them so that he might on occasional stumble into a crowd of people aching with the same passion he feels for something he loves.

So, telling others I have a library could be construed as a bit pretentious. I live in a beat up, falling, down, rotting out 100 year old house that is just a bit over 1200 square feet. Up until last weekend, half of our lawn was waist high. The other half merely tickled your calf. One burner works on the stove. The little one. The driveway is begining to cave in where some sort of tree root or stump was paved over. The stairs are just bare plywood. We joke about falling through the bathroom floor whilst sitting on the pot, but such jokes are made uncomfortably, because the likelihood of such an event isn't that far-fetched.

We shouldn't have bought the first place we saw.

The house had a few things that drew us toward it. At 25, we were fond of drinking around the fire we built in our grill at the trailer. This house sits mostly on bedrock. The bedrock spills out of the grass here and there, and the largest such place was turned into a firepit by the previous owners. The woodstove had dragons on it. There were ceiling fans in most of the rooms. We were impressed by the 100 years of history the house had. Part of the dining room had barn board halfway up the wall, and many of the downstairs floors were laid out with 4 inch wide pine that had aged to a lovely red color. But most important, at least to me, was the library off the livingroom.

Wall to wall shelves around half of the room. Good sized shelves too. I would not have to order my books by size (so frustrating when I had the perfect A-Z by author/title/subject depending on what I felt like that day system going). The previous owners had a few books, hundreds of pictures, and a large collection of magic trick paraphenalia. I saw row after row of neatly shelved books inside my head. At the closing the previous owner said her brother had been involved with set design for Rent. He had built the shelves. Some of the shelves have sagged a bit, and here and there a nail has pulled loose. For the most part, her brother did a decent job.

I packed up our trailer the summer Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out. My Mother In Law worked at an independent bookstore at the time and yanked the shipping boxes from the Harry Potter books for us to use as packing. I think she intended the boxes to help us pack up the entire house. 30 of the 32 boxes went to packaging my books. Nearly half of our 28 foot truck was filled with the white and green boxes. Upon unpacking we discovered that my 5 Wal-Mart and Service Merchandise laminated 72 inch bookshelves were redundant. My books fit. I didn't even have to use the strange little half sized shelves that were scattered among the normal sized shelves. For almost a year.

We've been here five years now. There are two full additional bookcases in the library and many of my books sit on the shelf space in front of where they would be placed if I had the time and energy to shift the shelves to make two more inches of space in the M's. I get a lot of Barnes and Noble gift cards at Christmas time and in June at the end of the school year. My husband has learned to build bookshelves. He's lined his own study upstairs with shelves, which bought me a few more linear feet for a little while when we moved some of 'his' books upstairs. Our son's room, our bedroom, and the landing at the top of the stairs are all due shelves "someday", too.

We couldn't decide on a decorating theme back when this house was new to us and much less of a headache. I liked medievally things at the time, but tapestries and candelabra don't work well in a 100 year old New Englander. We have too much crap laying around to carry off the spare old farmhouse look. I didn't want an ecclectic hodgepodge of things that "seemed good at the time" when it came to decorating our house. I finally owned something I could paint and refurbish, and I wanted to CHOOSE the feeling on the inside. Eventually we realized our decorating scheme was all around us. Books were laying in stacks by the bed. They were suffering the humidity of the bathroom. My books for work covered the kitchen table and the various tables in the livingroom. And there was that little room that was used for nothing but holding more books.

When we decide we can leave this home behind, we will advertise our real estate listing with the word's "A Reader's Refuge" or something like that. Truthfully, the house is too small for more than one child, the basement is only good for scaring the poor bastard that Irving sends out to service the furnace, and someday we will become the story that the local paramedics repeat at their Yankee Swap Christmas Party when one of us falls through the floor while on the pot. Only another reader would see the possiblity in this house as she tried to guess how many years she could get through before her own book collection began to outgrow the space.

When we are long gone from this house our friends will tell the amusing story about the dead squirrels in our walls, the load-bearing trim, or the time one of the basement supports gave way during my birthday party. But this house is also where I will have read the last Harry Potter Book. One Christmas break I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time. I rediscovered my passion for Robin McKinley. This house held me through the week long depression I was hard pressed to shake after I read the final book in Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. I began writing again, in this house, after I learned to give myself permission to write for the joy of the task and the "ache of passion" Mem Fox so tangibly describes in Radical Reflections.

When I close my eyes and think of my house, it is always a summer night. The night insects are singing and I am standing in front of my bookshelves, revisiting old friends or discovering that I have an actual unread books in the ranks. The bedrock below and the ceiling fan above keep me cool and my head is calm enough to simply drink in the room.