It's Only Money (Reprise)

I met with a representative of Horizon Movers/United Van Lines yesterday. Despite downsizing and offloading and tossing, the move will cost me $6,000.

It's all those books. Boxes and boxes of books. On topics as disparate as dyeing fabric with berries and writing a computer application in Javascript. Books about sewing and quilting and beading and stained glass and mosaics and art and adoption and Gloucester and all sorts of computer languages. Books from law school that I want to open again to reread a favorite case. Every book by John Grisham and Scott Turow and Tom Clancy. A few cookbooks just to dream over, to wish I had the cooking gene. Oh, and magazines. Every issue of Threads since the summer of 1994. Some favorite issues of Bead & Button and Beadwork. A few issues of Vogue Pattern Magazine that contain articles I want to read when I have time.

There are people who say one should not keep books, should not have a personal library. Those people say you can go to the library to get the books you want to read, then take them back when you're done. But I write in the margins and in the flyleaf. In my programming books, I paperclip the pages that have information I'll need to refer back to. And as I sit and stare at my bookshelf, I see a book I haven't touched in a long time and I remember the joy of reading that book, remember what I learned or what I felt.

The most vivid example to me of that statement is "An Adopted Woman" by Katrina Maxtone-Graham. Before I happened across that book (in a library, as I recall), I thought I was crazy. I thought there was something wrong with me, to have the feeling of disattachment. "Disattachment" is my word, I guess. I can't think of any other word to accurately describe the feeling of not belonging anywhere, of not being connected to anyone, of not belonging in the universe. When I read "An Adopted Woman" and realized that there was at least one other person in the world who felt like she didn't belong, I cried. I cried for the years of feeling out of place. I cried for thinking there was one ounce of my being that was 'normal', whatever that is. I cried for being one of those unfortunate adoptees who was dealt a mother who didn't know how to offer what an adoptee needed—unconditional love. And I cried for my sons, whose scarred mother had not been able to deliver unconditional love to them.

Tyler and I had this book discussion a year ago as he was packing to move to Youngstown. He said he likes to think that a person walking into his home knows him a little better by seeing the books that are on his bookshelf. That's probably why I have the librarything application on my blog and why so many people add a similar application to their Facebook profiles. My eclectic collection of books mirrors my eclectic collection of interests.

Get rid of all my books? I'd rather pay $6,000 dollars to move a large piano and a large stack of book boxes than get rid of these treasured friends.