Attic Salt for April 27, 2008

• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Apr 27, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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In the last afternoons of cool weather, I built a fire outside and read.

I’d found firewood stacked at a neighbor’s curb, wood left from the winter that my neighbor was throwing away until I came along to recycle it.

It was some of that wood that warmed my legs as I read the last pages of Tony Earley’s book, “Jim the Boy.”

I’d gone to the library looking for Earley’s new book, “The Blue Star,”  but other people must have seen the same magazine ad I saw. I got on the waiting list. “Jim the Boy” was on the shelf, so I checked it out.

Earley’s stories are as much little manuals for how to live one’s life as they are literature. Earley places readers in the tiny North Carolina town of Aliceville before World War II in “Jim the Boy.” In Earley’s new book, Jim Glass is a senior in high school and master of all he surveys from the hill where he and the town’s other children go to school.

That afternoon in front of a little fire in the courtyard, I kept looking up at clear blue sky and trees full of leaves. The air felt like winter, but it was spring. The air got cooler as the afternoon deepened but the sun hung on. Clearly, it wasn’t winter. Better, it was no time.

It was one of those freak cold snaps in late April. The spring garden had been in for weeks, over planted and not doing much. The basil had popped from seed, grown a few inches and hunkered down to await hot days.

The bell pepper grew to a lush green and set fruit in the cool nights. Sweet pea climbed the wire fence behind the bell pepper like gay pirates clinging to the shrouds of a captured prize ship.

Morning glory slipped in unannounced and took over a stanchion in the garden that supports a wind chime. Evening glory (moon flower) began its bid for vertical space. With luck, morning and evening glory will establish themselves and bloom morning to evening through the summer.

I bought red bell pepper plants at the Farmer’s Market with the assurance that the bell peppers will start out red. Will they have the same full sweetness as bell peppers that turn red over time remains to be seen.

A few days later, an e-mail from the library told me that the person who’d put a hold on “The Blue Star” must have been a speed reader because the book was at the East Baton Rouge Parish Carver Branch Library where I might pick it up at my convenience.

The quandary of the slow reader is having to read not one but two books in a short period of time — short for the slow reader. I rode my bicycle to the library to collect Earley’s new book.

Back at my fire, I dipped into the second book before returning to the first. Mostly, I kept a careful eye on the glowing embers in the oval hole in the chimenea, relishing the warmth of an April fire on my shins.