Library Annex – Day Twenty One

Library Annex

I’m excited.

Granted, it doesn’t generally take a lot to make me happy, but I haven’t experienced this particular ‘excitement’ in quite a while.

Karl and I engaged in some serious decluttering this weekend. Oh my goodness; I feel liberated.

Decluttering and Books

Most of my efforts were directed toward rearranging our books. We are incredibly lucky to have a wonderfully extensive – if eclectic – collection. They can be broken down roughly into about ten categories:  metaphysics; shamanism (a subcategory, it could be argued, but we have so many it has to be its own category); writing; science fiction; art/creativity; reference (yep, I refuse to get rid of our bound World Book encyclopedias, various dictionaries, thesauri, atlases); memoir; general fiction/young adult/feminist literature; plant/nature/environmentalism; and divination.

When we purchased our home back in 1985, a significant appeal was the ‘library’ (really just the dining room), which had bookshelves taking up all the free space on every single wall. The former owners had painted the walls behind the stained wooden built-in shelves a dark green, mimicking the deep green felt of libraries of yore.

Naturally, we were obligated to fill those shelves.

And through the years and the raising of three sons, through both lean and flush times, our greatest single indulgence as a family was books. In fact, for many years, it was our tradition to go to Borders on New Year’s Day. Although, truth be told, any excuse would do – and it didn’t have to be the start of a brand new year.

Borders and Barnes & Noble

Travel soccer tournament in Virginia? No problem! We’d just scope out a bookstore that we could retreat to between games. Ideally, we’d look for a local independent store, but for a while there, the easiest finds were the ubiquitous ‘big box’ purveyors, namely the aforementioned Borders and Barnes & Noble. They also had the best hours. Any trip anywhere, no matter where or for what purpose, would always be made better by tracking down a bookstore.

We’d often find something small and local almost everywhere we went because, being the odd ducks that we were, we would seek out the ‘metaphysical’ bookstores. Our experience was that the ‘big box’ stores were resistant to carrying selections out of the mainstream – at least at first. Or maybe I should say, their selections of shamanic books, for instance, were so pathetically inadequate that they would rarely be worth our time. (In other words, they carried Castaneda. Period.)

The appeal, though, of the bigger stores was the selection of magazines they carried. Son Karl would inevitably snag the latest copy of Fortean Times, and as we drove home or to the next soccer game, he would read us outlandish snippets from its pages.

Maximus and Sage would almost always find something to read, at least while we browsed. And lot, a lot, a lot of comedy found its way home from these excursions. Indeed, every Farside anthology published can probably be found somewhere in this house.

Come to think of it, Karl and I used to get teased by our fellow parents at soccer games because we’d never show up without each harboring a book.

Library Annex

Anyway…

My delight in what we worked on this weekend stems from the fact that the bedroom that used to be Maximus’s is now entirely a library annex to our downstairs branch! This has enabled me to free up the shelves downstairs – no more books piled crossways on top of those regularly shelved – or I could say stuffed. And the cool thing is that it doesn’t feel as though I am making room to buy more books, although that will always remain a possibility. (Just so everyone knows, we are dedicated library-goers as well.)

Rather, freeing up our shelves and creating an upstairs library is more of an energetic opening than anything else. It feels like we’re creating more room to allow our creativity to flourish.

And that, my friends, is truly exhilarating.

(T-1090)