the towers of february

What a pleasure. I often read Stump the Bookseller, but not frequently enough to have submitted a solution to a stumper such as

I read this book when I was about 12 years old. I can't remember who wrote it or anything but it was about this girl whose mother and father were alchoholics or something, and she ran away from neighborhood bullies into a cemetery. She eventually stayed in the caretaker's house and there was this statue of Michaelangelo that was some kind of transmitter to another planet. It was one of the best books I read as a kid and I remember more about it, but my sister said that you guys can find any book.

or

I'm trying to find the title of a book I read in grade school (circa 1975-78). The plot involved a girl who goes to stay with some relative for the summer and meets a ghost named Felicia. I can't remember much else except there was a photograph in which Felicia, when alive, was not allowed to pose with her baseball bat, and at the end of the story when everything is resolved, the photo has changed so that she has her bat. Can someone please help?

or

The story involved two children, a brother and sister. They end up on hard times and have to travel to a relative's home or country estate. The relative is an old man, a lawyer maybe? Anyway,the story involves a family mystery or tragedy involving two other children from the past, one or both died in a fire. The modern children have to solve the mystery and prevent the tragedy from happening. I remember something about a "Wheel of Time" and something about the garden. The elderly relative is involved in some form as well. There's a passage in the book that said something about time being a wheel and all you had to do to travel from one time to another was to ride the wheel and know when to step off.

or

The book was about about boy living somewhere other than his home, maybe an English country estate. He makes friends with the shadows in the garden. I remember the shadows eating a cake. When you cut the cake and took a slice, the piece would fill back in because it was a shadow. And there was something in this garden they were frightened of, maybe a statue or a fountain. I remeber the story being very interesting and enchanting.

or

The protagonist, probably a 12-or-so-year-old girl, learns that her mother is not the woman she has grown up with, but another woman, whose name was Kat. Kat is an artist. One of the girl's strongest early memories from that time is being in some sort of cage (maybe in a park?) and poking a stick through the bars, messing up the wet paint on Kat's canvas. I think she called her "mommikat" at the time. The book has something of an Alice in Wonderland theme because the girl keeps dreaming about the Red Queen, which is partly what leads her to the discovery of her real mother. The girl's best friend is the daughter of a psychologist and gets into trouble at the end of the book for having been an amateur psychologist about the whole thing. This is all that I can dredge up. I must have read this book between 1975-1985.

or

I read this as a young girl and would love for my daughters to read it. I can't remember all the details, but a young girl, I believe an orphan, climbs a wall and enters the woods to find an old, broken down cottage. This becomes her sanctuary and she lovingly fixes it up. The story, I think centered around her lonliness and the joy that the cottage brought her.

...but of course I wanted to, because it was through Loganberry Books that I found Steps Out of Time and Another Heaven, Another Earth and The Elephant and the Bad Baby and The Loner and Toby Lived Here and others. Others had identified the above, and thank goodness, because I don't want anyone to be without obscurities like Beloved Benjamin is Waiting or The Ghost in the Swing or classics like The Ghosts and The Shades or favorites like Step on a Crack and Mandy. But to date, I haven't been the first to solve one, one that I am sure is so obscure that I might be one of three people in the English-speaking world who know both the book and the site.

This is the stumper:

I read this book in the school library between 1988-1989. It's a young adult fiction that centers around a boy who wakes up in an abandond apartment building by the sea. Next to him is a chest full of journals; the rest of the book is about those journals. In the journals, he discovers that he has traveled to another place, in which he met a girl and her father (and a dog?). He has amnesia of any time spent in the other place (so there, he has no memory of here). They spend time together, and he grows closer to the girl. In the end, he discovers the way home hidden in a pattern on the great oriental rug in the girl's living room. The ending is bittersweet, but this story has been bugging me for some time.

It is, of course, Tonke Dragt's The Towers of February. It was one of my absolute favorites when I was reading Madeleine L'Engle and The Cat in the Mirror and The Shadow Guests (two other books people have sought through Loganberry Books), books about time travel (as is The Ghosts). HPV and I were convinced that the story was real (the book had newspaper clippings! That proved it!) and that we could figure out the way to journey to this parallel universe as well. I asked the children's librarian to save it for me, because it barely circulated and I knew it would be discarded eventually. Indeed, aside from the rash of date-stamps in 1980 and 1981 when HPV and I read it to tatters, it was checked out maybe seven times in 20 years. I have it, that very copy, but I haven't read it in 900 years. Until last night, when I started it again.

And wow, the different message that I got this time. Parallel universes and the dog-girl Téja and the rug and Thomas Alva and the cockade flower and the no-electricity, sure; but much more the hostility of one world for another. It was like rereading My Side of the Mountain as an adult and only then noticing how everyone who isn't Sam thinks he's preparing himself for duck-and-cover days.

bike and jog

Two 3.6-mile city rides. Jog maybe a half-mile sandwiched in 2 miles of brisk, long-strided walking. Ow, and 25 stationary lunges. That's what hobbled me on Saturday, not the running.

I didn't swim. I was nearly falling asleep when I left work.