You can meet a book more than once.

First, you might meet a book when you are little, and your tiny fingers fumble from page to page in eager anticipation of what comes next. You've learned to read "in your head," and you are proud of how you take in the words without sounding them out. Sometimes, you understand the words but not what they are saying -- but now, you don't know what you don't know.

You might return to the book when you're a little older. It's been on your shelf for some time, and you've passed it by with the "been-there-read-that" gaze, until it strikes you that it's been a long time, and you don't really remember it. It's suddenly interesting to play comparison, to match the story you read now to the story you read then. There are details and moments that you do not remember, nuances that passed you by. You read as eagerly as you read when you were little, and wonder at how much you missed.

I like to think of it in terms of my experience with Ethan Frome, although not quite the story. I first met the book when I moved into college, when my Grandma gave me a nicely bound copy as a moving in gift. I read the first chapter but was soon caught up in the whirlwind of college, and didn't open the book again until a year and a half later, during winter break of my sophomore year. I knew it was the first time opening it since then, because orange, gold, and red leaves slipped out as I flipped through the pages. So this was where I had kept the leaves I had collected that first college fall. It was a strange moment, sitting there in December with autumn leaves from a year and a half ago scattered around me.

I slipped in the leaves to keep and forgot about them. And in a way, this is what we do when we read books, knowingly or unknowingly. We slip in our thoughts, our responses, and sometimes, leave them behind. When we return to the book we find our thoughts and impressions as we left them, and inspect them curiously. To return to a book can be as poignant as that moment was for me, with the leaves of the days of my first impressions of college spread in my lap.

The other half of the story, of course, is that I read Ethan Frome. And the story was rich and beautiful. And likewise, when you re-read a book, it isn't only the leaves of your original impressions that you'll find. You've grown up since you last read, and you'll notice things you passed over before. Books are mysterious that way; they have a way of finding you where you are, even as they themselves do not change.

It's a good time of year to read books old and new. Cold winds and gray skies make for reflecting and dreaming times, times to pour into books you've never read, but also books you've already known. On a snowy afternoon this winter, amidst the endless new books to read, you might revisit an old friend of a book.