sounds and silence

While nosing around our local library yesterday I sat down in an aisle and was immediately transported back to the library my mother and I frequented when I was a child. See, I had lighted upon one of the two-tiered step stools that you don't see as much these days, but which used to spring out of library carpets like sober metal toadstools. It isn't the shape or color of the thing, so much as the sound that took me back - the peculiar metallic splurch as my weight forced the bottom ledge over the wheels, and the way that little noise cut through the silence of the library. I had entirely forgotten it.