Facing our Addiction

We spent the day cleaning the basement today. The main motivation - to find a new home for the 16 boxes of books we brought home when we cleared off our school bookshelves. Our classroom bookshelves held the books we loaned to students. Our office bookshelves were filled with references and the occasionalmbook we needed on to illustrate that one lesson every year.

Now they all sit in boxes in front of the already brimming bookshelves in the basement. If we we allow them to stay in the boxes, we will forget their covers. If we unpack them, other books will have to go to make room. We are book addicted and we don't know where to turn for counseling! We could open a book store now that we once again live in a town without one. We could donate a good portion of them, but what if we teach again? We could try bartering books for services and goods, but that doesn't seem likely in a suburb where the traffic slows around the mall and COSTCO entrance drive.

Truth be told - home is where our books are. There is comfort in being able to go downstairs late on a winter's night to pull that one book off the shelf and find that one marked passage on a dog-eared page that contains the quote that has been lodged in your mind all day - that you cannot sleep without rereading. And Google is a sorry substitute for the analog object with the college marginalia and the memories of time spent with text.

For the time being, we are making more frequent trips to the library where the books with the neon pink "new" stickers beckon, feeding an addiction that may not have an easy cure.