personal technology:Kindle 2 is too two to ignore???

I'm loving it!

OK, so I'm the book woman . . . Every gift to a family member has "a book" at the top of the guesswhatitis response list. The youngest grandbaby is vocal about her expectation that I arrive on her doorstep with books in my bag, every time, without fail. The second oldest said to me, just before Christmas, "Nonny, you won't believe this but there's this book I want . . ."

A Kindle was on my Christmas list but not under the tree. My children laughed at me. How could I--the catalyst for their own paper and ink book addictions, the very reason none of us has bookshelves enough, ever--want to read on a technothingamabob? a Kindle?

They were right. That part of who I am is imprinted in indelible inks on the pages where they keep their mother's perpetual profile. But some things change. Even mothers change. Even mothers old enough to be comfortably set in their ways change.

I ordered my own Kindle the day I discovered that generation 2 had arrived. I figured, backordered as it had been and still was, my Kindle would arrive with spring, or later. I was wrong. It arrived last week.

At the moment, the Kindle is charging--for the third time. I've bought three books, finished reading The Graveyard Book, am now somewhere in chapter 3 of By a Slow River (have ordered the print version too, but in the original French :).

Of all the personal technology that has come my way in this last year or years, this was the most natural transition from old ways to new.

It could be that being a book woman transcends physical form and substance.

It could be that being a book woman is all about having access--anywhere, anytime, any book--at my fingertips.

Could it be that both the book and the woman understand that change is the flip side of survive?

Or . . . could it be that, together, we're saving a tree or two or three???