One of the benefits of building a home library is what I call reading serendipity. If you have a lot of books, and a lot of different kinds of books strategically located, the chances for a random happy reading encounter increase astronomically.

I often give books as gifts in hopes of helping others build their own home libraries to discover the same reading happenstances, which can turn an idle moment into an inspired one.

Some books are easier to read small portions from, such as anthologies or poetry collections. One volume I pulled down the other day is called "Rural Free," written by Rachel Peden.

Peden was a newspaper columnist and author who lived on a farm north of Muncie, Ind. Her columns were published from the 1940s to her death in 1975 in the Indianapolis Star and the Muncie Evening News, and "Rural Free" was born from those columns.

The book's subtitle is "A Farmwife's Almanac of Country Living," and it takes the reader through a whole year; each chapter is a month.

She wrote three other books, and the Indiana University Press is republishing them for new generations. I'm lucky to have a first edition that I found in an old bookstore.

I began reading January, and before long I was into April where she noticed the first pink blossoms on an........

© Arkansas Online