Have you ever loved a piece of literature?  I have.  I love often, deeply, and forever.  My first love was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice at the tender age of twelve.  Over the ensuing years, I have had more love affairs with novels than men, and cried with more characters than old girlfriends.  Books are living breathing entities for me.  The characters bring me into their lives and let me walk with them the way I would  walk with a friend.  I see their souls and know their secrets and they have enriched my life and changed my heart in some small way.  Books have power.  They can make you smile or they can make you cry.  They evoke real emotion which is a large part of the drug that keeps me returning to those word filled pages.  But all books end.  That is the way of the written word.  We as readers as much demand an ending….preferable a happy one so that we know what has happened in this world into which we have ventured.  That ending though brings sadness as it means our journey with the characters we have come to love ends.

            I am still morning the loss of some of these relationships like the ghosts of old lovers. There is a whiff of nostalgia in the air…longing for the past or what once was.  I find myself today longing for Hogwarts and Harry Potter.  I read the series and waited with baited breath for each installment like the children who also were caught up in JK Rowling’s seductive world of magic.  I miss the breathing living world that created Acid Pops and Butter Beer.  I miss the characters that were lost along the way.  I grieve for Albus Dumbledore, Professor Snape, Lupin and Tonks.  The characters had such presence that their deaths were tragedies.  I miss the vividness and detail that was created in the books.  An entire alien and welcoming world was created.  It is one that I long for and seek to repeat.  Yet no books since have capture my heart they way this series has.  I was lucky and privileged to find such greatness once and I long for another. Yet somehow, if I never find it again, Harry Potter would be enough.