The day it snowed in Ballard this winter I found a soggy book across the street from Adams Elementary School. Inside the back cover was a notice from BookCrossing.com that began, "I'm not lost...I'm a wandering book!" and ended, "Books just wanna be free!" I had happened upon the secret world of books.

Since I started writing about Ballard on SeattlePI.com I have received consistently supportive on-line comments from a woman with the screen name MaryW, her icon flanked by a photograph of a white dog. I could tell from her comments that we were walking the same sidewalks, listening to the same tree full of invisible birds, both noticing the Olympics on clear days, sometimes it was as though we were witnessing events side by side. When I found the book in the snow I knew instinctively that it was her work.

My daughter logged in the BookCrossing I.D. number from the 1968 copy of "Winners and Losers: An Anthology of Great Sports Fiction" so that she could see where the book had traveled and when it had been "released." It had been placed by a "Mary." After the book icon ran through the search engines it produced a member profile - and the photo of a white dog.

So, my "reader" MaryW sends books in the wild. She belongs to an informal membership of 646,013 people in 130 countries who register and then distribute books through an on-line organization known as BookCrossing.com. Looking at their Web site I realized that books are on the move all over the world, all of the time. The site updates "captures and releases" every 20 minutes so I could virtually watch books being left at Golden Gardens Park, Market Street bus stop, and Cupcake Royale. My book sat on the coffee table while I watched and waited for the white dog and MaryW.

Finally she sent me a direct e-mail and I was able to contact her directly.

"I found one of your books. Can we talk?"

In writing her voice is big, on the phone it is smaller. I learn that Mary lives four blocks from me in an older home that the landlord has converted into a triplex; he is building an unidentifiable structure in the back yard and has boarded over the one window in her apartment that allowed in light. She tells me the apartment is very small, as is she, and that she was afraid of turning into "an old woman buried in books." She'd heard of BookCrossing.com years before she had a computer but then forgotten about it. It crossed her radar last fall; since joining last November she has released over 40 books. She claims that her bookshelves have never been neater and that it satisfies the "outlaw" in her.

"I'm really glad to hear your voice," she says to me and I feel the same way. She tells me about her life in Seattle and beyond, always involving books: volunteering for the Books for Prisoners program, driving cross country with a full set of Tom Robbins and Barry Lopez, becoming obsessed with collecting and archiving all the writings of the late Darryl Bob Houston. She tells me about the community she finds in the BookCrossing.com forums, in which unseen but caring members support each other in real time; such as two nights ago when a woman had to euthanize her eighteen year-old cat.

She has never met another member of BookCrossing but she knows there are others in Ballard; she has recognized their work. She considered leaving a book at the alcove in the library where it is posted not to leave materials, but was afraid of being seen.

"I only like to be an outlaw if I don't get caught."

We talk about her favorite authors and she asks, "Do you have time for a longer story?"

She tells me about a time in the 70's when "The Ave" in the U-District was her life. The Blue Moon Tavern reigned for intellectuals and artists and she was a "hippie chick" in a uniform of gypsy skirt, bare feet and bangle bracelets. One day she slipped into the Blue Moon and sat at a booth trying to be invisible while listening to conversations around her. But a young guy at a nearby table noticed her trying to identify his book; it was Tom Robbins' "Another Roadside Attraction." "You've never read it?" he asked. When she shook her head he said, "Go ahead and take this copy" while sliding the battered paperback across the tabletop.

"My life has never been the same," MaryW says matter of factly.

Over the years she has driven a truck cross-country, lived in New York and London, worked at a Native American school in South Dakota and returned to Seattle "like a woman who crawled across the desert to get home." Now she rises at 4:30 a.m. to walk the dog and then travels downtown to her job at a law firm. After work she walks the dog again, sometimes wrapping books in plastic to send on journeys that will lead them to other continents.

MaryW's life was changed by the gift of one book; she cannot resist the possibility of doing the same for someone else. Someone who may pass her on the street, never knowing that she is their agent of change.

Peggy can be reached atlargeinballard@yahoo.com. She writes additional pieces at http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/ballard.