A Tale of a Girl and Her Books

So I thought that yesterday would be ordinary. My mistake. It wasn’t. It was far from ordinary. My parents are working on a remodeling project in their room. They had this large bookshelf that they didn’t want to haul down our narrow stairs…and then where? No one relished the idea of carrying it out to the barn through all the snow, and there certainly wasn’t room downstairs for it. So, I walked into the room and said, “hey, how is it going?” And my dad had an epiphany. I don’t know if it was technically an epiphany, but he had a great idea. He said to me, “Don’t you like this bookshelf? Think there’s some place in your room for it?” And I gazed up at the whole 6 feet of it (it is 6′ x 30″, to be precise) and realized it would be a wonderful place for my books. I nodded eagerly and replied, “oh yes, I think I could use that!” You see, I’ve had quite the difficulties with my books. After my last trip to the Mises Institute I outgrew my original bookshelf. It was simply too small. So I had put some of my lesser books across the room in the closet. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked. And I ended up having a stack of books on the floor next to bookshelf, and then all the “in progress” books next to my desk. They weren’t really unified, and it was hard to remember where a certain book was, since I had books all over the place. So on that extraordinary Tuesday morning, I suddenly found myself unloading all the books from my shelves in preparation for a new bookshelf! And it was then that I realized my mother was right. She had always told me how much books I had, and I thought, “this isn’t really a lot of books…” but after unloading them all and carrying them across the room I quickly discovered that yes, she was right, I had a lot of books. The new bookshelf was brought in (it was very hard to move, there really wasn’t anything to hold on to, your hands kept slipping all the way up those 6 feet) and put in place. And then I sat for a while thinking about it. Admiring it. Thinking about where I should put what books. Eventually I had it all worked out. They look beautiful now. The top 2 feet is like one big shelf, and not very good for stacking books, so I made a pretty arrangement of things on it. I took some of my oldest books (you know, those old cloth-bound books from like 100 years ago?) and put one of my favorite figurines from a favorite friend on top of the stack. I leaned a couple other–smaller–old books (I’ve got this ancient pocket-size copy of Macbeth, it is really amazing!) against the side and then set a sea shell from Georgia against them. I arranged my other things…pinecones…Matryoshka doll…dried flowers in a vase…all that fun stuff, and it really looks very pretty. We’re going to put curtains on it though, to cover the rather tacky white sides of the shelves, and that will make it look even better.