Different nests

Yesterday I had to perform an act that went against every nurture bone in my body: I sorted through my books and selected about a third of them to give to the goodwill. The reason that this was difficult is that after living in my parent’s house for 18 years plus a boomerang summer, I am conditioned to surrounding myself with books and magazines like a bird feathering the nest. Ever since I can remember, my parents have been engaged in a never-ending cycle of first acquiring books and magazines and then devising systems and structures that will hold all of them. Bookshelves lined the walls of every house we lived in and when the books outnumbered the shelves, they were added to the stacks of periodicals that capped off any available counter or table. After living on my own for ten years now, I have a strong suggestion of this behavior in that I have kept every book that I ever bought and obtained shelves in which to keep them instead of letting them go. But there is a major difference between us that I had to face up to yesterday which is that in my parent’s house you will find The London Review of Books, Art in America, Winston Churchill and Wittgenstein, and in my house you will find Jane magazine, a Sue Grafton mystery and the Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. So, in an effort to create room for the nursery, I acknowledged that I do not really need to hold onto the whole Jan Karon series for the rest of my life in the same way my parents hold on to a set of Shakespeare plays. This also led to the bittersweet realization that Betty will not grow up in the thoughtful academic environment I did, but holding on to paperback Stephen King novels isn’t going to change that.