June 21, 2008
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Retirement
The leaves on the maples are turning over – silver side up. This, like cows facing the same direction as they lie in the pasture, is supposed to indicate rain in the offing. It is as reliable an indicator as the weather people who don’t seem to know what to do with Lake Erie let alone Lake Erie AND global warming. So maybe it will rain and maybe it won’t. We need it. The flowers are thirsty and the trees are beginning to wilt. Never a good sign. It is sad that our fellow travelers pay the price for our indulgence.
I am in a reflective mood brought on by the purging of a bookcase. We are a book family. Indeed we have always been a book family. For years it was because there was no library close at hand. And then when we moved to the village it was because our tiny library could not hold the esoteric and eccentric tastes of a family of autodidacts. However, once the village library – my home away from home – became part of a consortium it was like Christmas everyday of the week. In the last 10 years, I think I have only been unable to find a book that struck someone’s fancy twice. For the most part the material is out there. So, I am weeding the home collection. Just mine. Everyone else is responsible for his or her own collection but I have limited the space. No one is very happy. However, it has to be done. So there I was this morning, clearing out my own collection. I did not get rid of anything that made my heart beat a little faster or that made my hand linger over the cover and certainly not anything that I opened and read a paragraph or two when I should have been moving quickly on to the next. So all the poetry stayed. Thomas Merton and May Sarton and Virginia Woolf remain. Rita Mae Brown remains because she makes me laugh – at least the Hunsenmeir books. I really could unload her others as I think about it.
What surprised me was what I was able to get rid of without a look back. Being a theatre major I hung on to collections of plays and individual scripts for years just on the off chance that I might need them someday. I retired from directing two years ago and haven’t looked back. This time round, I was able to carefully and lovingly put old scripts and collections of plays in boxes for the library book sale. I kept Lillian Hellman and a couple of text books and my senior research from college. But the rest of them – gone. It’s the end of an era – a final admission that I really am done with that part of my life. It’s a relief – this being done. It’s kinda cool.
Yes! A storm is blowing in. Perfect. Curling up with a good book – one I borrowed from the library – and awaiting the deluge.
And so it goes.
Comments (5)
I had a professor who felt the same way after purging his books. Hard to imagine that it feels good. Lighter,
I can understand the lightening of the load. Kind of a symbolic making room to grow maybe but in a slightly but significantly different way. I am glad you feel good about it and tht you kept the texts you wanted to keep. Empowering the whole thing seems.
I felt that storm. It sped through here pretty quickly but it was fierce in some places. We had a brief tornado watch.
Hope the read was good and the way you ended this sounded very much like you are more than ready for storms of all kinds. Graceful too.
What a lovely post, from start to finish. Thank you. And a new word for me, too – autodidact! I’m one of those, too…
Enjoy the rain, I hope it comes.
We just got 4.5 inches of rain this week! We’ve had enough but this is the rainy season for us. I’m sure we’ll get more today or the next day.
I’m much more picky these days about what books I buy. I read but not all that often as in a book. I read a lot more online it seems.
One thing about living in the Midwest… Mother nature sure has an impressive way of ‘cleaning the slate’. Would that any of us were as effective at cleaning our own.