Timing with a Postage Stamp

When I was a teenager, or perhaps just before I reached those "teen" years, my parents left out of town for the weekend on a trip that left me home by myself. Where my two siblings were is beyond me, however, my mom had it arranged that I would spend the evening over one of her good friend's houses.
While this friend was considered my mom's friend, appropriately being closer in age, and sharing the familiarity of what it is like to have children, let alone more than one child, and juggling schedules back and forth from swim practice, school and trying to hold off the often noisy pagan sacrifices each child tried to commit on the other, there was a certain camaraderie with this friend and myself as well. While she had two perfectly fine children that were closer in age that would attract any kid to playing, I'd much prefer sitting at the table chatting with her rather than swimming in the lake, or getting involved in whatever game the gang was into on that particular occasion. So it was with great delight that I got to spend my very own evening over at her house, with her kids gone to swim practice, and watch grown-up movies, like "An Officer and a Gentleman" and talk about grown-up things like what we thought about life, and what we envisioned the future might hold, how we'd like to see things in our spaces and what not. In the course of this conversation, while the credits rolled up from the movies, my friend was telling me about how her father (if I recall the relation correctly) used to dream about having a bookshelf of all his favorite books and so slowly one by one, he purchased his favorite books in hardcover, placing each one gently on the shelf, watching it grow as he grew.
"I love that idea," I said, the little book-lover myself back then.
"Um hum, me too," my friend said.
"I could have a library just like Belle's, with my favorite books all up and down the rows with a ladder to slide around and find just the one I am looking for."
"Yes you could."
And so it became a tradition that each birthday, each Christmas, I would find a book in the mail. A hardcover book. Sometimes with a note of explanation in choice, sometimes without, but I always new who it was from. Even when this friend moved away, and we moved further away. Even when my mom and her fell further out of touch. Even when I began my own traveling, collecting library cards like postage stamps, where friends would call and ask, "Do you think you'll be ___ by summer because I'd like to visit?" knowing I often moved with the wind, a hardcover book always found me.
And so today, while I accepted a new formal job, and was walking up to the mailbox, moving the touch of nerves at doing something new, at moving once again, I smiled at the perfect timing my friend always has as I discovered a book waiting for me in the mailbox, and a note, reminding me of a truth she always believes and reminds me to believe as well waiting for me inside the pages. Just like the belief that someday I will have a bookshelf full of my favorite books, stretching from wall to wall.