Read an excerpt from the 2011 One Book One Nebraska selection, Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps by Ted Kooser:

"In the weeks just before Christmas, my father’s store was busiest, its narrow aisles crowded with shoppers, its carefully arranged displays rumpled and disarrayed, and its floors slippery with melting snow. On Saturdays and when school let out in the afternoons, my sister and I helped out. She worked on the sales floor, and I made bows for the women in the gift-wrap booth.

The bow machine was set up in the furnace room. A single light bulb hung over the card table upon which it sat. Behind my chair, the great gray furnace sighed and ticked, and piles of bald and disassembled manikins watched my back with wide unblinking eyes. In the shadows, bugs rustled across the floor, and above me the footfalls of customers knocked up and down the wooden floor. There I wound green and red satin ribbon into shiny bows that I dropped into a big cardboard box beside me. It was a job like those in fairy tales, in which a child is imprisoned in a castle and made to spin golden thread from flax straw.

Occasionally, my dungeon-keep would be visited by Otto Uhley, the store’s janitor. He was a friendly hump-backed man whose nose was runny from first frost until after Easter, and who frequently dabbed at his upper lip with the tip of his tongue. Because the bow machine was in his basement, he looked upon the bow making as his responsibility and included me in his rounds of mop closets, toilets, and shipping room.

As if to inspect my work, he would dip his great knobby hands into the bow box and swirl them about. The satin splashed and sparkled around his thick hairy wrists. Although it was my responsibility to deliver the finished bows to the gift-wrap booth, Otto liked to do it for me. Up the narrow back stairs he’d go, the big box in his arms, his round face buried chin deep in the shiny satin.

Sometimes, his visits to the furnace room would be cut short by the appearance of my father, who occasionally fled from the crush of customers above to stand for a moment or two in the quiet warmth of the basement. Whenever he came down the stairs, Otto would hurriedly scuffle off to the other end of the darkness under the store.

My father was then in his early fifties. As much as he enjoyed storekeeping, there were times when he was gray with fatigue. He often worked ten or twelve hours a day. As much as he liked visiting with customers, there were moments when he would fall silent and stare off into space. There were evenings when he would drive the family in our old Plymouth out to the edge of town, only to get away for a few moments. There, a farmer kept a pen of sheep, and my father would pull the car off the road and stop. “See, children,” he’d say, “how much the sheep look like the people who come to the store. Why, look! There’s Dr. Mason’s wife, and Mrs. Fitch, and, oh, there’s Gladys Fitzpatrick, bless her soul . . .”

It was at such times, when the press of the store had become more than my father could bear, that he would stop in the furnace room, his shoulders sunken, his arms hanging down as if to let his responsibilities drip from the tips of his fingers. Though he would have preferred to stand there in silence, taking a few breaths, he would ask me how the bow making was going and would answer questions about how things were going on the sales floor above. Then, as quickly as he had appeared, he would be gone."

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase Local Wonders, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Local-Wonders,671227.aspx.