“Three weeks is too long,” was the grumbled consensus as we began the final leg of the book tour/vacation last week. We all would have been happy to come home then. But we gallantly submitted to the extra days of recreation — water park and lobster rolls and beach and…bookstores.

The bookstores! They are thriving, people! From Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, I visited 23 bookstores in 21 days.

Some were quiet, others were bustling with summer readers, but there seemed to be a consensus among booksellers that an equilibrium has been reached, that the slaughter of the indies has ended.

This joyful news comes with some melancholy for me, because my local bookstore did not survive, a casualty of high rents and challenging times. I miss Village Books in Pacific Palisades. I miss the floor mural of authors. I miss the wall displaying what local book clubs were reading. I miss the chairs by the window, perfectly sunlit. I miss the children’s section. I miss the author readings, the folding chairs brought out for people packed in to hear writers — the famous, the local, and sometimes captured in one person. I miss having my favorite place in town, where some nights when I needed to leave the confines of my house I would walk just to look in its window.

I remember when I walked into the store in 2007, to deliver my pitch for a reading for Deliver Me: True Confessions of Motherhood, a collection of stories and poems by twenty writers I had edited and published. When I started this project, I had no intention of creating book. I simply needed a creative outlet, as my life was dedicated to the care and feeding of two little children. As the project grew, I realized I had a moving, lasting work, so I learned how to publish it. Walking into the store, I had barely uttered, “I have a book” when owner Katie O’Laughlin broke into a huge smile and said, “We’ll have a reading!” I wanted to kneel and kiss her shoes for her generosity.

The absence of Village Books is the only blot on the joy of coming home. After being away for three weeks, everything is one degree less familiar than when we left, everything is precious: the unadorned glory of one’s own bed, its worn sheets singing their softness, not their wear and tear. The 4th of July streamers left in one tree. The weeds displaying their power. My not-so-little-anymore little one singing, “Being at home feels so so good! Being at home feels so so good!” Indeed, it does. And although my bookstore-next-door lives only in the hearts and memories of its many loyal customers, I’m thrilled to know that so many other indies are still going strong.

And I’m setting out to visit as many as I can. California…here I come.