Three months into the new apartment and majority of our books and CDs still sit in boxes in our bedroom and laundry room. We work around and over the boxes, but I refuse to let them go to storage in the basement in the irrational fear they will never come back.
The book shelves and CD racks were among the many household items that didn't make the trip from the big Southern house to the small Northern loft, but we had planned on replacing them. It hasn't worked out that way and it is driving me nuts.
Many of the reference books have been pulled out in haphazard stacks on the window ledge, as are the dozen or so books purchased since arrival. There may be 100 CDs available in my car... but not what I want when I want it.
We sold and donated hundreds of books before I left Georgia, the boxed up survivors have already been deemed essential. Spectacular reads, books written by friends, first editions -- the loft seems unfinished and antiseptic without them.
I knew the day would come we'd have to adapt to our daughters not living with us, but our books?
The kitchen rack came on the truck so the cooking and wine books have a home, and there are small stacks of baseball and horseracing books in the foyer among memorablia on those subjects, but the books you share when friends visit and revisit when you are alone ,remain sealed and shrouded.
My cousin the electrician doesn't keep his tools in his living room and when my father was a cop he hid his gun when he had to bring it home. But to be a writer without books makes me feel like a sorry pretender.
Various promises and projects that will eventually fund the missing shelves have fallen through or still have no arrival date. I'm seriously considering the milk crates and cinder block/ scrapboard solutions of a couple decades back.
It could be argued my books deserve a finer home, but it would make me feel better.


Copyright 2005 Judi Griggs