Spring Cleaning

Every few months or so, my RRHB goes manic with the cleaning. Today, he decided, was closet cleaning day. That meant taking out every single box and item of, well, stuff, from the upstairs closet and going through it.

As a result, I purged books. Boxes and boxes of books. They were mainly leftovers from my university days, a lot of literary criticism, and piles of books I had never finished or would never read again. But every book that he brought out of a box and I looked at, had some sort of memory attached. Whether it was how awful my Victorian professors were in both under grad and graduate school, or how many copies of On the Road we own (count: 3) or the duplicates we discovered (3 different copies of Hey Nostradamus, all unread), and whole worlds of novels that every time one came out of the box I sort of welled up remembering why I loved it or what point of my life in which the book was read.

And now I feel a world better because books are not tumbling off the shelves, bell hooks can be rightfully passed on to the next righteous feminist coming into university, and I’ve got an entire shelf dedicated to the 1001 Books and to my own Around the World in 52 Books challenge. It’s funny how you can forget what you had for breakfast three weeks ago but you can remember exactly what it felt like the first time you read The Rainbow.

The funniest bit that came out of the afternoon was, no doubt, when I said, “Working in publishing is certainly going to be the death of me. I just can’t say no to any book.”

My RRHB returned, “You’re like an alcholic working in a bar honey.”

Indeed.