2021 wasn’t too kind to my blogging. I was a sporadic blogger to say the least. Not only was there the pandemic to live around, we had once told our daughter we would move and live near her when she retired from her career in the U.S. Coast Guard. Needless to say, she retired and held us to our promise. Cleaning out and packing up a home after you have lived there for 25 years is not an easy job. Either physically or mentally.
One of the most difficult choices I had to make was which books to move and which to donate. It was a difficult task and here’s why:
I’m a bookoholic. I love books. Big books, tiny books. Fat books, thin books. Old books, new books. Fiction books, nonfiction books. Mysteries, romances, cookbooks, history books, biographies. I love them all.
I buy books, I borrow books. I check them out of the library. I dug through a dumpster to save them when an Army library in Germany tossed them. Whenever I visit another city, I check out local bookstores and buy some book I didn’t know I had to have because I didn’t know it existed. I volunteered with the Friends of the Library for over two decades. It made finding treasures to buy even easier. I can’t begin to guess how many armloads of books I lugged home over the years.
I love the smell of new books and the crisp feel of a newly printed page beneath my fingers. I love the musty smell of old books and the soft, worn feel of a yellowing page.
I love the shiny dust jackets that make lavish promises. The audacious “New!” or “Latest” emblazoned on a 30-year-old book. I treasure the less presumptuous and tattered cover of the simple 1956 edition of a biography, promising only the life story of its subject.
I love the information inside the covers of books. Fiction or nonfiction, what joy it is to read what others have written. To be able to visit any time and any place while comfortably ensconced in an easy chair surrounded by books.
Books define who I am and how I live. They have gone from living in the multiple bookcases I have bought or had made just for them to showing up as part of the decor. Artfully piled on the coffee table, nestled in baskets in various rooms, or stacked in hidden corners like the treasure they are, books are in every room of my house.
And while I know that if I did nothing but read 24/7, I could never read all the books I have before I die. That’s okay because I’m a bookoholic. I’m not into reading them all, I’m into giving them a good home.
