When preparing for a trip of this length, a year or more, things can get complicated. Certain emotional swamps are unavoidable if you’re moving out of a house or even making decisions of what to put in storage. Sorting decisions have to happen. Downsizing sucks.
There’s a reason why it sucks so hard. It’s emotional. Stuff holds memories and we feel a sense of loyalty to the memory with which it’s associated. In a month we are moving. For the past few years, thirty boxes of children’s books sat in a room off of our garage. I refused to get rid of even one when we moved from Canada, so we paid a fortune to move them to Florida. I knew we needed to go through them and reduce them. But I resisted, even dreaded giving one book away. Why?
Moms express their love through many encoded ways; through food, cute clothes, a well decorated home, taking special vacations, enrolling kids in extra-curriculars, taking pictures, birthday parties, scrap booking memories, buying new toys, the latest electronics, or just by saying ‘I love you’. Not my mom. She didn’t focus on these, including the three little words. Instead, she expressed her love for us through books.
Some people put wallpaper or paneling on their walls, ours were covered with bookshelves. Not fancy factory built ones, but ones made with pine boards that sagged from the weight of their overstuffed shelves. No matter where my mom lived, her walls started bare and would eventually fill with shelves of tightly packed books. This was her version of a cocoon of happiness, being hugged by books.
Growing up, we were always struggling financially. Mom said that the only way immigrants and poor people can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps was with knowledge. The greatest thing my mom did to help us rise out of our circumstances was to give us books. They provided an escape, a way to transcend the current situation. They built knowledge, fostered creativity, opened other worlds, possibilities, options. My mom didn’t simply stretch our minds, she set us free through books.
When I was little we didn’t bring a book bag to the library, we brought cardboard boxes. The problem with this volume of books was we could never find all of them when the due date was already a week behind us. Not a surprising result of an overwhelmingly cluttered, chaotic house. What always followed close on the heels of overdue books, was parental arguements. We could never find them all, let alone get them back on time. Overdue fines accumulated. For our level of home disorganization coupled with our limited budget to pay fines, the library was way too expensive for our reading appetites.
Plan B was to buy books at Goodwill. No hefty fines for being disorganized. Books weren’t a big commodity at the Goodwill, it was a section that few people visited. Let’s just say our neighborhood wasn’t full of avid readers. Good for our family, since most of our books came from there.
Plan C was the annual book fair, an annual highlight for us. We would comb the tents of tables for good books and bring them back to our stash, which I was stationed to guard. If we waited until closing day, you could buy as many books as you could carry for $1. That’s when we bought many of our books.
My mom lived with us for seven years in Canada. She started with empty walls and by the time she left, there were twenty shelves, each shelf had four or five shelves, each shelf held almost a 80-100 children’s books. On my mom’s scale, that’s a lot of love for her granddaughters.
When the time came to sell the big blue house in Canada, we packed them up and spent a stupid amount of money to move thirty huge boxes of children’s books across two countries. I wasn’t ready to cull my mom’s expressions of love. Four years later, we are moving again. It’s the fourth time we’ve hauled those book boxes to a new location to sit in a corner. I knew it was time to go through them. I was ready…enough.
So we began. The three girls and I sorted box after box of books. It was like Christmas, no, like a hundred Christmases. They jumped up and down, squealed, laughed, read their favorite books out loud. So many memories, good memories, maybe the best. They talked about how much they loved being read to at night, by me, their dad, and of course, grandma. I reminded them how I would often put them to bed 45 minutes early to allow for the huge stack of books they’d chosen. I remember how tired I would feel at the end of the day almost dreading the reading, but after the first book, I was enjoying it as much as they were. It was soothing, calming, relaxing. Being snuggled up with one of my three treasures as we’re transported into the story, there is nothing that matches that kind of magic. How they loved that time, how I loved it even more.
My mom is now well into her nineties. When we say good bye after a visit, she always asks me if there are any books I want to take from her shelves. She has many for me to choose from on history, peace, gardening, and new Christmas one, craft or baking books for the girls. Nothing would make her happier than if we would leave with armfuls of them, stuffing the trunk full. It’s ok mom, I know what you’re trying to tell me, but don’t have the words.
My mom will not leave us money, possessions, or property. I didn’t realize this until we unpacked the book boxes. But it was her love of books that she bequeathed to me and to my children. She did this while she was still alive, and her gift will continue to influence after she is gone. Her legacy to us wasn’t a simple love of reading. It was hope. So simple. So profound. Hope illustrated through stories of different lives, places, thoughts, people. It was a stretching of our minds, awakening of our creativity, of who we might be, would be. That was the gift she ultimately gave to each of us. It was the greatest bequeath of all. Thank you mom, for loving us your way.
