Our home is filled with the things most homes are filled with – family pictures, well-loved books, Grandma’s Bible, Granddad’s wood planes. Our home is also filled with odd treasures - hand-me-down furniture, rescued chairs, auction riches, and I could never have guessed some of the things my children would become attached to.
One of my sons has called dibs on the old restaurant dishes w
e use every day. One son wants my typewriter, another wants the clock, one daughter has claimed the photographs of her great-great-grandparents, and the other has laid claim to certain books. Who knows why certain things are important to each of them?
We used to take road trips. We would load up the Suburban (or, many years earlier, the much-despised minivan) and trailer and we would head out across three provinces, singing songs, playing games, lifting our feet as we crossed every railway, ducking our heads as we passed under every overpass, holding our breath as we crossed every bridge, stopping every thirty-two miles because someone had to pee. We kept large scrapbooks, some of them old-time scrapbooks with black pages, in which we made Dear Diary entries every night before bed. We (well, I) wrote out what we had done that day, where we had gone, whom we had seen, and so on. We included ticket stubs, postcards, brochures, till receipts, maps, and all manner of good stuff. The day's entry always ended with everyone's favourite part of the day. Sometimes instead of telling every story, I wrote something like, "Remember Finnegan doing acrobatics and getting caught up in the tree?" or "Remember putting David's snakes in our pockets?" or "Remember the dead fox on the railway tracks?" which sparked memories and encourageed the kids to tell the stories themselves.
These summertime journals become bedtime stories, generally somewhere around the middle of January when tales of bright, sweltering summer days were a welcome distraction from deepest winter. The reading and storytelling usually took us way past bedtime, but what of it? We were reliving the memories we had created together – who could send children to bed in the middle of such moments? The scrapbook journals, fat and bulgy, frayed, stained, several even smeared with bug guts (Manitoba mosquitoes are the worst!), are some of my children’s most well loved treasures.
My kids aren’t shy about putting dibs on whatever it is they want from the house after I die. They have no problem calling the blue jug, or my typewriter, or my red gloves. Sometimes they ask if they can have certain things before I die. The one who gets my engagement ring once said, “Hurry up and go so I can have my ring”. Little brat. (grin) Oddly, my kids don't fight over who will get the fancy scrapbook albums with their pretty layouts and carefully protected pages…..but there is an ongoing battle over who will have custody of the holiday journals. Ü
Really, knowing my brood, I ought to have seen that one coming.
Looking outside, it seems rather incredible that it is actually spring. The accumulation of snow on our sheds and the great white mound which is all that remains of the four majestic poplars we had to have removed from our yard last fall (the only good wood remaining on one of them was the bark, which is not actually wood at all...our insurance company ought to be quite relieved!) indicate winter has no intention of releasing us from its hold quite yet. The annual Tulip Appearance Bet between my husband and myself is being reconsidered. Ordinarily, we place our stakes (always a pizza and Cokes) on the date the tulips down our front walk poke their tiny green and maroon heads through the soil (he always chooses 15 April, my date varies from year to year). This year, however, we are considering betting on whether the tulips put in an appearance at all. One of us remains hopeful (albeit, guardedly so) while the other has surpassed pessimistic and has become downright negative. According to the negative one among us, not only will the tulips not flower, their foliage will not grow above a hand-span, barely a few sad inches. Further, according to the nay-sayer, there will be no peonies, no lily of the valley and—especially, worst of all—no sweet peas.
Well! That’s enough to make a person cross.
One particularly warm week in January, my husband brought me a willow branch laden with dozens of furry little catkins. I stuck it in water, just to see what would happen. Today, it has lovely, strong roots and any number of sweet, lacy green leaves. Even some of the kids are excited about planting it out in the yard...if the ground ever thaws.
In an attempt to placate ourselves, to quiet our jitters, since we cannot take coffee cups in hand and wander about the garden, poking at the soil to see who survived the winter and who was not so fortunate, who has put out new shoots and who requires a trimming back, we cleared the dining room table, gathered together peat pellets (totally magic, if you ask me), plant cells, cell trays, the ingredients for light and tender starter mix, the baby bath we use as a potting tray, two spray bottles, a length of plastic (which, in former lives, has protected shop equipment from dust and travel abrasions, kept paint spatters off furniture and contained a few stray batts of fibreglass insulation), saw horses, plywood and the big wicker basket containing absolute treasure in the form of thousands of seeds.
I must admit I am an obsessive seed-gatherer. I wander the garden deadheading like a good girl, but I always leave one or two flowers to wither and die and set seed which I drop into little home-made triangular packets, dated and labelled. These I place carefully into the Treasure Basket. My horticulturist husband shakes his head in despair at my slap-dash system of labelling. As he sorted through the Treasure Basket the other day, he was forced to comment, “Honey...you have convolvulus, ocimum basilicum and myosotis seed in here. You also have bachelor’s buttons, love-lies-bleeding and Manitoba tomatoes.” At this point, I looked sideways at him, waiting for the question I know will next escape his lips. “But tell me,” he asks, his brow furrowed (that’s a gardening joke!) in puzzlement, “what does ‘f. bed und. delph nana’ mean? What do you have in this packet?” He rattled the packet at me, his eyes narrowed (unfairly, I think) in suspicion. For, despite our blessed compatibility, we have very different ideas about what form a garden ought to take and what ought to be contained within it. He is a fan of soldierly rows of plants, well-spaced, well-mannered, well-ordered specimens, in front of which are stuck little signs listing genus, species, origin, common name and plant habits. I favour looser, blowsier, more relaxed plantings, reminiscent of an abandoned-and-newly-rediscovered farmhouse garden. I adore cosmos, he calls it “a weed, and an ugly weed, at that!” And I don’t like signs. He insists on sticking those infernal little signs into the soil near our plants and, while I completely respect his right to have the signs, I also exercise my own rights…..by flipping soil (quite accidentally of course) at them until they are covered over...and effectively eliminated.
He was still rattling the seed packet, awaiting a response, somehow knowing he will not like the one I’d give him. It was my turn to shake my head, lovingly of course. “Silly!” I said, “ ‘f. bed und. delph nana’. Those are seeds of that little short thingie with the pinkish flowers that we planted under those delphiniums that were mislabelled,” I looked at him hopefully, “Remember?”
He didn’t.
He tossed the seed packet disdainfully onto the table, selected a fresh, brightly coloured, store-bought packet from the Treasure Basket (store-bought seeds are always his contribution to the Treasure Basket...he has this thing about wanting to know what to expect, about not wanting to be surprised by what grows...I don’t get it). I rescued my grubby little triangular packet (my own dirty fingerprints are all over it) with its unknown contents, determined to plant the seeds anyway.
He pretended not to have noticed.
There is something therapeutic about digging about in the dirt, even if the dirt is contained within a baby bath on the dining room table on a sub-zero afternoon in the middle of March. Plunging our hands into the soil, loosening it, fluffing it, breathing in the loamy goodness, we set about to fill hundreds of cells with soil. Then, we fill hundreds of soil-filled cells with seeds, perfect little promises. Buried Treasure. We create a nursery table in the sun room, mist The Babies (as I am now calling them) and cover them over, clipping the edges of the plastic to keep in the moisture and to keep out the cats. Our home smells wonderfully of moist soil, of wet dirt, of spring. We scrub our nails, reluctantly removing the dirt that has reminded us of the garden, a place we are both blissfully happy. We put on another pot of coffee, we turn the TV to a gardening show where everyone is wandering about in hiking boots and shorts and we try not to notice the snow falling just outside our window.
Perhaps people are like salmon. Perhaps the area in which we are born marks us as indelibly as a badly healed childhood wound. Perhaps moving away from our beginnings becomes our badly healed childhood wound. Perhaps, like salmon, we spend the rest of our lives trying to return to what we first knew, trying to recreate the atmosphere, trying to ‘go home’.
I was born to farm people. I was the fourth generation of my family to live in the two-storey, Dutch-gabled, white and green farmhouse on the south half of 7-13-22, near a tiny village in Manitoba. My first memories are of that house and of events transpiring within it. The smell of lilacs will still send me reeling through time to land on the front lawn in the heavy-scented shade of a lilac hedge planted on the east side of the house, now nearly seventy years ago. Last time I checked, the hedge was still there.
Some people paint flowers or wildlife or the sea. Some people paint mountains or hearth scenes or fantasy worlds. Fields and farm buildings form the subjects of most of my paintings and drawings. Like salmon, I have spent most of my life feeling the murmured lure of ‘home’.
A movie I am very fond of tells of an aged woman, living with her son and daughter-in-law who do not, cannot understand. Our grandmotherly woman runs away from home and makes a long journey by bus to ease her longing to return to the place of her childhood. It is—and is not—everything she expected. That is as it should be.
Somehow, I have become the repository of family memorabilia. Somehow, I have become the dumping ground for all those things found in chests and drawers and boxes by my aunts and uncles, things which would be of absolutely no worth to anyone who did not have the happy accident of being born into our family. I have received photographs, brittle and yellowed newspaper clippings, school reports, scribblers filled with the daily musings of my grandmother, bundles of greeting cards given and received five decades ago, envelopes full of postcards picked up during road trips through the northern states, decorative plates commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of this church or the seventy-fifth anniversary of that settlement, a number of community history books and even a portion (just a portion, mind you) of a watch which once belonged to my great-grandmother. Amassed, these items would be of laughable value to anyone who did not know the land and people whose artefacts these are. My children, a generation removed, have been to the farm, have seen the house, have wandered through it, but it was unlived-in and contained, to their eyes, nothing more than a few dishevelled remains, the detritus of a family long moved on. A generation removed, my children never knew most of the people whose well-loved images appear in the photographs on my piano. A generation removed, my children have lives shaped by different forces, different faces, different places. This farm in south-western Manitoba with the two-storey, Dutch-gabled, white and green house, is, to them, nothing more than the stuff of legend, for truly, that is what a family history becomes.
Treasured among the goodies passed to me for safekeeping is a cash book for the farm, kept the year I was born. Written across twelve pages in this blue-covered, coil-bound volume, I see evidence of the successes, the disappointments and the struggle which characterised farm life in that day. Then, as now. I see that the hired man’s name was Mervin and that he was paid wages of two dollars; I see that a trip to the city meant paying for a meal (forty cents) and parking meter (one cent); I see that a hair cut set you back a dollar and each visit from the vet (twice in one week during June) was a six dollar touch. The ledger records that a tractor could be obtained (from Ed Hare) for $25, and a truck could be bought for $35. A sow sold netted $47.65 while a sow bought cost $65. Cigarettes cost fifty cents and bars were a nickel. The cost of a dance plus lunch was $2.55 while the same evening out including a sitter for me, was $5.50. After totalling the receipts from hog cheques, premiums, cattle cheques, baby bonus, et cetera and deducting the costs of feed, seed, gas, veterinarian, barn spray, insurances and machine parts, et cetera—oh, wait...deduct the payments made to my grandfather, with whom the farm was operated in partnership (though my grandfather lived in town) - and the year’s profit breaks down into a monthly income of approximately $55, from which must be deducted groceries ($8-$12 every two weeks), hydro ($6.05 per month), telephone ($6 per month), fridge payment ($13 per month), prescriptions and clothing/shoes/diapers for two adults and a baby. Is it any wonder the words my father penned on the front cover of the ledger are “RISK N’ HOPE”?
Someone tucked a store receipt inside the front cover of the “Risk N’ Hope” cash book. It is a receipt for coffee, sugar and milk from Glinz’s Solo Store, total cost: ninety-three cents. For the record, Glinz’s Solo Store features “nationally advertised merchandise: groceries, dry goods, fruit & vegetables”. If you found the need to contact Glinz’s Solo Store by telephone, you would, as directed by the notice at the top of the receipt, “Phone 9”.
I received a call the other day. Someone found some old photographs they had forgotten about and they are forwarding them to me to do whatever it is I do with them. The current owner of the vacated, family-less farmhouse has offered me the great gift of both coloured glass windows from the front room. Curiously, it seems that ‘home’ is slowly making its way to me.
I have placed the three-column cash book on my bookshelf between “75th Anniversary History of Blanshard Municipality, 1884-1959” and “History of Blanshard Municipality, Volume II, 1884-1970”, produced for Manitoba’s centennial celebrations. I know that whatever spiritual connection remains between me and my Manitoba farm, I am beyond fortunate to live, as I do, on a corner lot in an Alberta town. My house is white and green, but it is only one storey and there are no Dutch gables.
I have, however, planted lilacs on the east side of the house. Perhaps in seventy years, someone—a grand child or great-grandchild, perhaps—will come reeling through time to land on the front lawn in the heavy-scented shade of my lilac hedge.
The thing about loss is that it brings with it some measure of pain. It seems that when it doesn't, it isn't counted as loss. It's a curious set-up. Curious, too, is the fact that a loss seems all the greater when it is sudden or unexpected.
Like most people I know, I have had my share of loss. I have been force
d to let go of people, places, lifestyles and even beliefs I have loved and been comfortable with. Some of these losses have proven to have positive outcomes. They have cleared the way for new and unexpected things, things I had not dreamed of for myself, things which became, eventually, loved and comfortable in their own right. In terms my gardener husband would use, those losses were hard prunings.
Some of my losses have shattered me, have shaken me to the centre of my being. Some I have never recovered from. They have left huge and gaping holes in my life, holes in my heart. Some day I may heal from such losses, but I have not done so yet. However painful they are to live with, I am certain they were necessary. That doesn't make them any less frustrating, of course, and it doesn't make them any more bearable, but I have learned to live alongside these losses without making friends with them. I have learned to give a little when it is necessary and I have learned that it is sometimes necessary to give a little more than I think I can.
Most of the time, I am not impressed with this set-up. I'm okay with learning from the experiences and I'm good with the growth that invariably springs from loss. I am fine with having to let go of one thing in order to be able to receive another, What I am not so calm and even about is that it is necessary for letting go to happen in the first place.
I am letting go again today...this week...last week, too. I am preparing for growth...trying to remain focused on the horizon while extracting my boots from the mire of pain and loss where I now stand.
Moving forward. Moving ahead. Moving on. May I always remember that a hard pruning is sometimes what is called for and that some losses are indeed necessary.
Peace ~
L
I know a lot about Jell-O, but something I did not know is that a ramekin, just a 1/2 cup ramekin, falling from the second shelf in the cupboard (I swear it leaped!), will strike a bowl (actually an 8 cup Pyrex measuring cup) of Jell-O (quantity of four cups at that point) at the dissolving-in-boiling-water stage, with enough force to: a) shatter the ramekin; b) empty the bowl of more than one full cup of liquid (so said the measurements on the side of the cup); c) spray that more than one full cup of liquid a distance greater than four feet in all directions. Including up. Did you know that? Until this afternoon, I did not know that. Good thing I was wearing a black shirt. I did not take pictures because: a) the Jell-O was running everywhere and, as it was not yet dissolved, it was drying and hardening in seconds; b) Jell-O stains light grey countertops (which I have)....especially when it is cherry-grape Jell-O (which is what I was making); c) having just had a Jell-O shower, I was too drippy and sticky to run through the house to get my camera bag; d) and was WAY too drippy and sticky to handle my camera. My youngest son heard the noise and came to see what was going on. "What happened, Mum? OOOooooohhhh! Whoa!" This brought his next older brother to the kitchen asking, "What's going on? Holy crap, Lois! Gross! What is that?" They're such helpful boys. (rolling eyes)My light grey counters are stained, but my walls, cupboards, floor, cannisters, oil bottle, toaster, taps, kettle, stove, bla, bla, bla, are clean and de-stickified. I have a suspicion I will be finding Jell-O spots for days.Peace ~
I share this today because Kate loves horses as much as I do. Peace ~I have spent three days trying to accomplish what normally takes less than two hours. Ordinarily, I have a thought in my head, I have an idea, a phrase or a sentence, I sit down with it, hand it over to my Muse and, before a hundred and twenty minutes have passed, something approaching a column has been written. That’s how it works ordinarily. This week, as though to illustrate to me that I am not on the road to mastering the principles of my craft (moreover, that I may have wandered completely off the map), all of my sitting down and handing over has come to nothing. I have spent hour after tedious hour playing with words, coaxing them, manhandling them, trying to turn them into something resembling a cohesive expression of thought. They have fought me every step of the way. I have no less than five arrested attempts to prove it.
It’s curious how every day, from the very moment we are born, we are presented with opportunities to learn lessons and life skills. In today’s fruitless battle with words, I had forgotten one of my greatest lessons. In fact, this one has been absent from my mind for a long time...perhaps this literary frustration was just the event needed to remind me of what I knew as a child.
When I was nine and ten years old, my horse Pebbles (no, I didn’t choose that name but because she had learned to answer to it, I kept it...rather, she kept it) and I spent every possible waking moment together. To my everlasting delight (also, I expect, to shut me up), my father had traded our VW van to a local farmer for a miserable, cranky, neglected old nag, prone to biting, kicking and balking. Somehow, the total adoration of the child that was me loved her back to kindness.
In 1973, a VW van could buy a horse, but not the saddle that went with it, so I rode bareback. I did have a bridle (purchased from the Co-op in the next town with my bottle-picking money), but tended not to use it once Pebbles had become more docile—I had once slipped the bridle over my own head and taken the bit in my own mouth and decided that, because it was disagreeable to me, it must be disagreeable for my horse as well. I would clip a lead (or sometimes just tie a bit of twine) to her halter, haul myself up on her sun-hot back and be gone. “Stay where I can see you,” my mother would say and, because we lived on the prairie, I could wander miles from home and still be seen.
Because I trusted her, the day Pebbles stopped short in the empty field behind our house, and refused to budge, I knew something was truly wrong. What I discovered was a coil of barbed wire hidden in the long prairie grass. The wire had curled up and around her legs, was pressing against her belly and was tangled in her tail. Pebbles and I were trapped in a barbed wire snare. I called for help, but who is there to hear in the middle of an August afternoon in a town of only 82 souls? Everyone with any sense was over at Wood’s Garage sipping Cokes in the shade (that would be the kids old enough to drive—all three of them) or down at Eldon’s Meat Market smoking pipes and drinking coffee (that would be the men) or over at Helen’s General Store smoking cigarettes and drinking tea (that would be the women) The kids (including the teenagers, there were only 14 of us in town—and six of them were from the same family!) were headed home for snacks of Freshie and Rice Krispie squares, just like I had been. With no aid forthcoming, the only thing for me to do was to slide off Pebbles’ back into the barbed wire nest, bare legs, yellow thongs and all, and go for help. So I did, first explaining to Pebbles how important it was that she remain perfectly still so as to avoid slicing open her pretty legs. She blinked her long, black lashes as though in understanding.
There were no adults about our house—as I say, they were at Eldon’s or Helen’s...or maybe even Wood’s – so I found the biggest pair of wire cutters on the property and headed back to extricate my entangled horse who, I discovered, had not moved so much as a hair. It had not occurred to me to change from shorts to jeans, nor had it occurred to me to trade my thongs for runners, so before five minutes were up, I was covered in scratches, cuts and pokes. As I struggled with the wire, Pebbles kept careful watch. When at last I freed her left front leg, she lifted it gingerly and stood, balanced on three legs, until I had cleared a safe space for her to set it down again. We worked like this for over an hour, ten year old me bleeding from dozens of minor wounds, fourteen year old Pebbles watching intently, helping as best she could and occasionally licking a particularly sore cut on my leg. By the time I had cleared away the last of the wire and freed my horse, my hands were blistered and cut, my back was sunburned where my shirt and shorts had not met, and I was bleeding from my shoulders to my fingertips and from my thighs to my toes. I couldn’t heave myself onto her back, so Pebbles and I walked home through the long grass, avoiding the thistles and gopher holes. The whole interminable way, the horse that had once nipped at everyone just for the sheer pleasure of it, rested her head on my shoulder and licked my arm. I carried pail after pail of cool water out to her for drinking and pail after pail of Dettol water out for washing her legs. I couldn’t actually see any cuts, but I figured it was the right thing to do. Besides, she had earned a wash and a rubdown.
When the adults came home, it was my turn to be washed with Dettol water. My mother bandaged the deepest gouges on my legs and wrapped my hands in gauze before I walked (wearing jeans and runners) back through the field with my father to gather up all of the barbed wire for safe and proper disposal.
I don’t know what happened to Pebbles. We moved the following winter and she was sold for $35 to a farm family with three children. I hope they were good to her. I hope they loved her as much as I did. As much as I still do. I hope she loved them in return. My father told me he had looked for her once, many years ago, when I was again keeping horses and would have had a place for her, but she was gone.
Over the past three days, I have tried too hard to write what I had to say. I didn’t stop to realise that, sometimes what I have to say and what needs to be said are not the same thing. I had forgotten the lessons I learned that scorching, summer afternoon on the prairie—lessons of trust and tenacity, lessons of patience, lessons of gratitude and of love.
The last line of one of the books I loved best when I ran barefoot on the prairie seems particularly appropriate today...even if I must misquote by changing the horse’s gender. “If there’s a hoss heaven, please God, rest her soul.”
Yeah.
Amen to that.
Before I even understood them, I was fascinated by written words. I did not know the names of the individual letters, nor the sounds of any of them were meant to make, but I knew that whenever these figures were strung together in particular combinations, they represented communication. I knew that one person could set down a series of these figures which another person could look at later….and understand. It was magic, and I wanted to know how to do it.
They tell me I was speaking in complete sentences by the age of twenty-two months. They tell me I would ask to have new words, long words, complex words repeated until I had learned them for myself. They tell me I would ask the name of everything I saw and ask the meaning of every word I heard. I must have been particularly insistent (read: annoying) about my desire to learn this form of magic, because I was taught to read when I was four years old (I would be prepared to bet it was so my mother could have some respite from my endless questions and my unceasing requests to be read to) and they tell me that, once I had been taught to read, I also wanted to know “how do you spell that?” They tell me I announced, at the age of five, “What an extraordinary day I’ve had!” They tell me (and I well remember) that at the age of six I announced “When I grow up, I’m going to be a writer!” Shortly after this pronouncement, our neighbour (an artist of considerable talent, prone to tragic bouts of depression and occasional self-mutilation...a perfectly fascinating man for a child to know!) made me the gift of a 1928 Underwood typewriter. “If you’re going to be a writer,” he told me, “you’re going to need a writer’s tools.” At about the same time, my grandparents gave me a set of encyclopaedias which had been published before my father was born. They fed my addiction. My obsession with words grew, quite naturally, into an obsession with books.
I read everything I could get my hands on. When there were no stories left to read, I read the dictionary, studying language origins and root words, looking up the definition of words within definitions, and flipping to every “see also:”, using pronunciation guides to figure out how to wrap my tongue around polysyllabic words with seemingly too few vowels or an excess of consonants. I was positively beside myself when I discovered a thesaurus. The rules of phonics intrigued me, especially the exceptions to the rules, which appealed to my abstract sensibilities.
The library my mother used to take me to was one of those beautiful, nineteenth-century stone creations with hardwood floors buffed to a high shine, and ceilings that stopped somewhere just short of the sky. It smelled gloriously of floor wax and wood polish and books. On hundreds of dark shelves stood thousands of books—new books with colourful jackets and crisp pages, old books with gold-stamped leather covers and heavy linen pages cut with paper knives; there were thin volumes to fit easily in one hand and massive tomes which had to be heaved onto one of the elaborately carved tables for inspection. I would sometimes (out of sight of the severely disapproving, birdish librarian who wore her spectacles on a beaded chain and who never put her arms into her cardigan, but wore it over her shoulders with the top button fastened under her wattled chin) reverently extracted one of the greatly worn books from a shelf, held it to my ear as I opened it, hearing the arthritic complaint of the spine. I would fan the pages carefully, bathing my face in wafts of its’ cool, musty scent before burying my nose in the book, smelling dust and paper and ancient ink, almost believing (and fervently wishing) I could draw the story into myself. In a carpeted and brightly lit room in the basement, the children’s books waited in bright rows on white shelves. My favourite (borrowed at least a dozen times) was an alphabet book which began, “A—acrobats eating asparagus…” Once home with my armload of treasure, I would hurry to my room and throw myself across the bed to lie belly-down under the window, reading. And reading. And reading. An adult of whom I was not particularly fond once shook her head at me—the child with her nose buried in yet another book—chiding, “You’re going to ruin your eyesight with all that reading!” I worried about that for a while, until I discovered the story of Louis Braille in one of my encyclopaedias. I felt reassured knowing that not even ruining my eyesight to the point of blindness could stop me from reading.
When I was small, we had no television. Most of the people my parents knew lived in television-free homes, as well, but however many toys and puzzles and games there were, I was always drawn to the books. I learned more about some people from their bookshelves than I did from conversations with them (or from eavesdropping on my parents’ conversations with them). I still feel uncomfortable in homes where there is no evidence of reading material. My own bookshelf residents (there are books in absolutely every room in our house) have been grouped according to subject, in an arrangement loosely based on the Dewey Decimal Classification System. The shelves are full—overfull—and I have boxes of books stored away in the basement. I need more shelves. My husband says I need fewer books. I offered to make a trade—I would reduce the number of books I harbour (“After all, how may books can you read all at once and do you ever actually LOOK at most of them?”) if he would reduce the number of vintage wood planes he has gathered (“After all, what do you actually USE them for? Don’t you have two routers?”).
We are currently in a position of stalemate.
Though he does not share my passion for the written word, my husband does pander to it. On gift-giving occasions, I almost always receive a certificate from one of my favourite book stores. Other people give me these, as well (My favourite people!), and I hoard them away in a Very Safe Place until it is Just The Right Time. There is a tremendous thrill in walking through the doors, knowing I can have any book which catches my eye, any book which feels right in my hand, any book whose prose fills my mouth with the round resonance of its’ vowels or strikes my tongue with the staccato sharpness of its’ consonants. My family knows that once I enter the temple of books, I will be lost to them for an indefinite period. One of my children once resorted to lying (tugging on my coat and entreating, “Mum! Dad just answered the cell phone and he says we have to leave right now!” The cell phone was, at that moment, in my own pocket) in an attempt to prise me from a display of out-of-print books.
Once, for no reason at all, my husband bought a book he “knew I would love”. I don’t remember much of the plot, but the cover is embossed with medallions and scallops and scrolling which feels marvellous under my fingers—a tactile delight! He’s right, I do love it.
He once made a four hundred kilometre trip to an antique shop in order to surprise me with a century old edition of a favourite Mark Twain volume (how wonderful is that?). He may not share my passion, he may not understand it, but he encourages it and, it seems, has resigned himself to living with it.
My latest favourite quote reads, “The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.” Quite so. But let me have a try at them all, anyway.
e use every day. One son wants my typewriter, another wants the clock, one daughter has claimed the photographs of her great-great-grandparents, and the other has laid claim to certain books. Who knows why certain things are important to each of them?
