Mama's Home Remedies: Discover Time-Tested Secrets of Good Health and the Pleasures of Natural Livin by Svetlana Konnikova (series like harry potter txt) 📗

I dreamed about an adventurous voyage on a “flying vessel” set to explore far away countries and discover new lands. It was my winter “Dream Garden” filled with books instead of plants. This memory is often brought back to me by the aromas of lilac, lavender, and burning birch and the sounds of Tchaikovsky’s unforgettable music. We had thousands of books in our home library. Reading was one of my favorite pastimes, especial y in winter. We didn’t have computers and computer games when I was growing up. We didn’t have television broadcasts with boring, upsetting news and undelivered promises by politicians. It could never have substituted or competed anyway with the world of classic literature and music. I savored the time I had to read masterpieces of literature, created by talented people throughout the world through the centuries. I convinced myself that the books would substitute successfully in the wintertime for all the fine, soft-petaled spring flowers; the bounty of sweet-smelling summer blossoms and herbs, their scents made stronger by the heat of the summer sun. I imagined that the books I held in my hands were paper flowers, blooming with brilliant human thoughts, so I developed a “strange” habit. It amazes me now how dedicated I was to reading and how I read each book voraciously as if I were a starving peasant with an insatiable appetite, gobbling down each word as if it were my last bit of bread, my last drop of honey. I read volume after volume of Jules Vern’s science fiction, Alexander Dumas’ novels, and James Fennimore Cooper’s colorful adventures. I devoured the works of Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Honore de Balzak, Gustave Flaubert, Theodore Dreiser’s dramas, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare’s tragedies, and Walt Whitman’s poems. It was a feeding frenzy. I never stopped reading an author’s collection. I read volume after volume until I finished all of them. It was my passion. Reading was what I most hungered for in my life. I read all of their works, including the epistle genre: the letters they wrote to loved ones, friends, and other writers.

224 ^ Mama’s Home Remedies

With all the tomes of literature at my fingertips, it was hard to say what I loved most, but I have to admit that my favorite books—even now—are unforgettable folktales and fairy tales from around the world. I had heard plenty of them from Grandma and I fell in love with these anthologies and will hold them dear to my heart for the rest of my life because these tales are good and wise. They reflect our real life, and they are a bright example of intelligent human thought. They became for me a window to the world and a brilliant tool with which to learn about it. After all, these beautiful stories came to me from the Fairyland, the mystical, magical land of fairies. I learned a lot from fairy tales told by Dutch storyteller Hans Christian Andersen. I read almost all of them. Sometimes I explore his storehouse even now, and I find always there a mix of fantasy and true-life experience. I am full of wonder. I have learned about destiny, and I admire the noble actions of his heroes. I find I effortlessly float into his fairy tales and transcend this real life and all at once I am a character in another realm.

Our big candle shone with a small orange fire and quietly burned down, marking time by growing smaller, dropping purple tears, sharing the lovely ambiance of which it was a part with all of us in the room, its heady fragrance of lilac intoxicating us. Very soon this flower would celebrate spring in Grandma’s Dream Garden, but winter was still upon us and so I nestled comfortably into a chair and read Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Candles,”

a beautiful fairy tale written in 1870.

There was once a big wax candle which knew

its own importance quite well. “I am born of

wax and molded in a shape,” it said. “I give better light

and burn longer than other candles. My place is in a chandelier or on a silver candlestick!”

“That must be a lovely existence!” said the tallow candle. “I am only made of tallow, but I comfort myself with the thought that it is always a little better than being a farthing dip: That is only dipped twice, and I am dipped eight times, to get my proper thickness. I am content! It is certainly finer and more fortunate to be born of wax instead of tallow, but one does not settle one’s own place in this world. You are placed in the big room in Trips to the Fairyland @ 225

the glass chandelier, I remain in the kitchen, but that is also a good place; from there the whole house gets its food.”

“But there is something which is more important than food,” said the wax-candle. “Society! To see it shine, and to shine oneself! There is a ball this evening and soon I and all my family will be fetched.”

Scarcely was the word spoken, when all the wax-candles were fetched, but the tallow candle also went with them. The lady herself took it in her dainty hand, and carried it out to the kitchen: a little boy stood there with a basket, which was filled with potatoes; two or three apples also found their way there. The good lady gave all this to the poor boy.

“There is a candle for you as well,