My sister and her husband arrived from Saskatchewan this evening for a visit. After getting them settled in, offering a late night arrival snack and having a good visit, Cindy and I sent them off to bed and then scrambled to keep our streaks alive. For Cindy that means Duolingo au francais and for me it's my daily blog post.
(Before you say, gee whiz Marko you had all day to write a post, I did not. I spent the day cleaning, decluttering, buying groceries and cleaning some more. Company, you know. )
But this isn't a post about writing a post. Oh no. It's actually a post about letting go of things.
Part of the decluttering was moving along two dozen books. Our book collection has far outgrown our shelves, to the point where every level surface in the living room and guest bedroom contained precarious stacks of paperbacks. They were all excellent books, many of which we loved and wanted to re-read one day. But the stack of books still to read never goes down. It grows faster than the 'books we have read' piles. We will never re-read them, so let's move them on so my sister has a place to set her suitcase, and we can all eat together at the same table.
The beautiful thing about Victoria is that it was easy to send these books to new homes. We are blessed with hundreds of free little libraries and there are 8-10 good ones within a five block radius. So I loaded up two grocery bags and started dropping them off. I had visited six boxes before I got to the grocery store and now that my bags were empty, I could fill them up with food and head for home.
It's hard for me to get rid of books, especially the one which were gifts. But they aren't really gone. I think of these little library boxes as communal storage units. They are holding a community's stock of books that are not currently being read, but unlike locking them away in an actual storage locker, these books will be read soon.
I might see 'my' books again one day, as I'm searching through my favourite little libraries. And if I find an old friend, perhaps that will be the time to take it home and re-read it.
PS - I remember reading an article where people tracked the journey of a travelling book, by writing names, dates and locations in the front cover. That's the general gist anyway - -it's a fleeting memory. I need to design a tracking sheet for the next books I add to the book boxes. It would be awesome to see the book in another box later and be able to see all the folks who have read the book since I last saw it.