This weekend, the tasks were much more Herculean: cleaning out my parents' home. My father died six months ago, and he was a book collector. Not a hoarder, because they were all very tidily arranged, and the ones that were antique and valuable all meticulously cataloged for inventory. He did not, however, EVER cull the herd. He had my mother's second year university french lit textbooks. He had our 1980 World Book encyclopedia set, replete with year end summaries for the next ten years ahead. He had a copy of every H.G. Wells novel and textbook ever published. Two copies of some. But then he left me. And left the planet.
So I sat in his library and cried. Wiped tears off dust jackets that he had measured and cut for each first edition in his collection. Pulled books off shelves and there were more behind them. Hand written cards that described each book in his antiquarian collection were in a box, detailing the date of purchase, the book's provenance, and price paid. So how do you minimize THAT? How, indeed.
I can't keep them all. Being a minimalist forbids it, but logic also tells me that I can't hang on to things when I will always have my memories, the stories I tell my boys, and the DNA my parents gave me that makes me who I am. But Daddy's library was his lifeblood. It defined him. Although I will never have books that approach his numbers, books define me to a degree. I love to hold them, smell them, and imagine those before me who may have held the same book.
So this Mother's Day, I culled the herd. I donated the zillion paperbacks and academic texts and recycled the magazines and journals he had in excess. But then, I made room in my life for the important ones. I packed, in order on the shelves, all of the books that were his pride and joy and drove them 250 miles in a U-Haul to my study to replicate their habitat. It's not substantially minimal. But it is perfect.
Happy Mother's Day, friends.
