So, telling others I have a library could be construed as a bit pretentious. I live in a beat up, falling, down, rotting out 100 year old house that is just a bit over 1200 square feet. Up until last weekend, half of our lawn was waist high. The other half merely tickled your calf. One burner works on the stove. The little one. The driveway is begining to cave in where some sort of tree root or stump was paved over. The stairs are just bare plywood. We joke about falling through the bathroom floor whilst sitting on the pot, but such jokes are made uncomfortably, because the likelihood of such an event isn't that far-fetched.
We shouldn't have bought the first place we saw.
The house had a few things that drew us toward it. At 25, we were fond of drinking around the fire we built in our grill at the trailer. This house sits mostly on bedrock. The bedrock spills out of the grass here and there, and the largest such place was turned into a firepit by the previous owners. The woodstove had dragons on it. There were ceiling fans in most of the rooms. We were impressed by the 100 years of history the house had. Part of the dining room had barn board halfway up the wall, and many of the downstairs floors were laid out with 4 inch wide pine that had aged to a lovely red color. But most important, at least to me, was the library off the livingroom.
Wall to wall shelves around half of the room. Good sized shelves too. I would not have to order my books by size (so frustrating when I had the perfect A-Z by author/title/subject depending on what I felt like that day system going). The previous owners had a few books, hundreds of pictures, and a large collection of magic trick paraphenalia. I saw row after row of neatly shelved books inside my head. At the closing the previous owner said her brother had been involved with set design for Rent. He had built the shelves. Some of the shelves have sagged a bit, and here and there a nail has pulled loose. For the most part, her brother did a decent job.
I packed up our trailer the summer Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out. My Mother In Law worked at an independent bookstore at the time and yanked the shipping boxes from the Harry Potter books for us to use as packing. I think she intended the boxes to help us pack up the entire house. 30 of the 32 boxes went to packaging my books. Nearly half of our 28 foot truck was filled with the white and green boxes. Upon unpacking we discovered that my 5 Wal-Mart and Service Merchandise laminated 72 inch bookshelves were redundant. My books fit. I didn't even have to use the strange little half sized shelves that were scattered among the normal sized shelves. For almost a year.
We've been here five years now. There are two full additional bookcases in the library and many of my books sit on the shelf space in front of where they would be placed if I had the time and energy to shift the shelves to make two more inches of space in the M's. I get a lot of Barnes and Noble gift cards at Christmas time and in June at the end of the school year. My husband has learned to build bookshelves. He's lined his own study upstairs with shelves, which bought me a few more linear feet for a little while when we moved some of 'his' books upstairs. Our son's room, our bedroom, and the landing at the top of the stairs are all due shelves "someday", too.
We couldn't decide on a decorating theme back when this house was new to us and much less of a headache. I liked medievally things at the time, but tapestries and candelabra don't work well in a 100 year old New Englander. We have too much crap laying around to carry off the spare old farmhouse look. I didn't want an ecclectic hodgepodge of things that "seemed good at the time" when it came to decorating our house. I finally owned something I could paint and refurbish, and I wanted to CHOOSE the feeling on the inside. Eventually we realized our decorating scheme was all around us. Books were laying in stacks by the bed. They were suffering the humidity of the bathroom. My books for work covered the kitchen table and the various tables in the livingroom. And there was that little room that was used for nothing but holding more books.
When we decide we can leave this home behind, we will advertise our real estate listing with the word's "A Reader's Refuge" or something like that. Truthfully, the house is too small for more than one child, the basement is only good for scaring the poor bastard that Irving sends out to service the furnace, and someday we will become the story that the local paramedics repeat at their Yankee Swap Christmas Party when one of us falls through the floor while on the pot. Only another reader would see the possiblity in this house as she tried to guess how many years she could get through before her own book collection began to outgrow the space.
When we are long gone from this house our friends will tell the amusing story about the dead squirrels in our walls, the load-bearing trim, or the time one of the basement supports gave way during my birthday party. But this house is also where I will have read the last Harry Potter Book. One Christmas break I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time. I rediscovered my passion for Robin McKinley. This house held me through the week long depression I was hard pressed to shake after I read the final book in Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. I began writing again, in this house, after I learned to give myself permission to write for the joy of the task and the "ache of passion" Mem Fox so tangibly describes in Radical Reflections.
When I close my eyes and think of my house, it is always a summer night. The night insects are singing and I am standing in front of my bookshelves, revisiting old friends or discovering that I have an actual unread books in the ranks. The bedrock below and the ceiling fan above keep me cool and my head is calm enough to simply drink in the room.
We shouldn't have bought the first place we saw.
The house had a few things that drew us toward it. At 25, we were fond of drinking around the fire we built in our grill at the trailer. This house sits mostly on bedrock. The bedrock spills out of the grass here and there, and the largest such place was turned into a firepit by the previous owners. The woodstove had dragons on it. There were ceiling fans in most of the rooms. We were impressed by the 100 years of history the house had. Part of the dining room had barn board halfway up the wall, and many of the downstairs floors were laid out with 4 inch wide pine that had aged to a lovely red color. But most important, at least to me, was the library off the livingroom.
Wall to wall shelves around half of the room. Good sized shelves too. I would not have to order my books by size (so frustrating when I had the perfect A-Z by author/title/subject depending on what I felt like that day system going). The previous owners had a few books, hundreds of pictures, and a large collection of magic trick paraphenalia. I saw row after row of neatly shelved books inside my head. At the closing the previous owner said her brother had been involved with set design for Rent. He had built the shelves. Some of the shelves have sagged a bit, and here and there a nail has pulled loose. For the most part, her brother did a decent job.
I packed up our trailer the summer Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out. My Mother In Law worked at an independent bookstore at the time and yanked the shipping boxes from the Harry Potter books for us to use as packing. I think she intended the boxes to help us pack up the entire house. 30 of the 32 boxes went to packaging my books. Nearly half of our 28 foot truck was filled with the white and green boxes. Upon unpacking we discovered that my 5 Wal-Mart and Service Merchandise laminated 72 inch bookshelves were redundant. My books fit. I didn't even have to use the strange little half sized shelves that were scattered among the normal sized shelves. For almost a year.
We've been here five years now. There are two full additional bookcases in the library and many of my books sit on the shelf space in front of where they would be placed if I had the time and energy to shift the shelves to make two more inches of space in the M's. I get a lot of Barnes and Noble gift cards at Christmas time and in June at the end of the school year. My husband has learned to build bookshelves. He's lined his own study upstairs with shelves, which bought me a few more linear feet for a little while when we moved some of 'his' books upstairs. Our son's room, our bedroom, and the landing at the top of the stairs are all due shelves "someday", too.
We couldn't decide on a decorating theme back when this house was new to us and much less of a headache. I liked medievally things at the time, but tapestries and candelabra don't work well in a 100 year old New Englander. We have too much crap laying around to carry off the spare old farmhouse look. I didn't want an ecclectic hodgepodge of things that "seemed good at the time" when it came to decorating our house. I finally owned something I could paint and refurbish, and I wanted to CHOOSE the feeling on the inside. Eventually we realized our decorating scheme was all around us. Books were laying in stacks by the bed. They were suffering the humidity of the bathroom. My books for work covered the kitchen table and the various tables in the livingroom. And there was that little room that was used for nothing but holding more books.
When we decide we can leave this home behind, we will advertise our real estate listing with the word's "A Reader's Refuge" or something like that. Truthfully, the house is too small for more than one child, the basement is only good for scaring the poor bastard that Irving sends out to service the furnace, and someday we will become the story that the local paramedics repeat at their Yankee Swap Christmas Party when one of us falls through the floor while on the pot. Only another reader would see the possiblity in this house as she tried to guess how many years she could get through before her own book collection began to outgrow the space.
When we are long gone from this house our friends will tell the amusing story about the dead squirrels in our walls, the load-bearing trim, or the time one of the basement supports gave way during my birthday party. But this house is also where I will have read the last Harry Potter Book. One Christmas break I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time. I rediscovered my passion for Robin McKinley. This house held me through the week long depression I was hard pressed to shake after I read the final book in Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. I began writing again, in this house, after I learned to give myself permission to write for the joy of the task and the "ache of passion" Mem Fox so tangibly describes in Radical Reflections.
When I close my eyes and think of my house, it is always a summer night. The night insects are singing and I am standing in front of my bookshelves, revisiting old friends or discovering that I have an actual unread books in the ranks. The bedrock below and the ceiling fan above keep me cool and my head is calm enough to simply drink in the room.
posted by Bellanca43 | 9:47 PM
1 Comments:
What a beautiful account of your love affair with books. You know -- I can totally relate, except it's not my bathroom I might fall through, but my kitchen. My desire for built in shelving is all encompassing. I wander around my house, looking into every corner, wondering -- could I put shelves here?
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