I Should Have Been a Librarian....

I just realized today that there are books for sale on Etsy. Now this could help solve a big problem I'm having. See, my daughter in Portland, Oregon wants me to move there, something like 1400 miles away! Nothing much left to keep me in Kansas, folks are gone and my son in Kansas City is planning on moving to Washington (the state) in the near future. So I'm all for it EXCEPT that I have so many "treasures" and I just can't afford to move all of them. Books are heavy and if there's a market for them they would be a good thing to weed out.

So most of the afternoon I spent on Biblio.com, checking out the going prices on some books. I have probably close to 300 cookbooks and maybe 100 craft books and this isn't counting paperbacks. I pulled a pretty big stack out of this one bookcase and set it on the floor beside my computer desk and started going through them, putting the ones that I was going to list in one pile and the ones I couldn't part with in another. Well, one pile ended up pretty big and the other not so much. Guess which way it went? Yeah, out of about 30 books I had weeded out 5! Plus I kept getting sidetracked looking through the books, finding recipes I wanted to try and getting pretty hungry in the process.

I wasn't making much progress with the cookbooks so I went and got an armful of craft books from my work room. I picked the ones that were mostly sewing thinking I'd be better at getting rid of them as I'm not that crazy about sewing. Hell, I've glued hems up before and the last time I actually cut out a pattern and made something to wear was a jester costume for Halloween and that was probably 20 years ago!

I did a lot better this time but it was hard, really hard to give up my dreams of the patchwork quilt I've planned to make for the last 30 years, the applique wall hanging that's so outdated that it's back in style again and....on and on....

I know I'll be able to find whatever I want on the internet but it won't be the same to me. There's just something about holding an oversized book on my lap and flipping through the pages, the beautiful photographs catching my eye on the way by, going back and finding the page and then sticking a scrap of paper in the pages of the ones that I'll make "someday". And it doesn't really bother me that there are so many that I'd never have the time to get to all of them if I lived to be 200 years old. It's the same kind of feeling that I get looking through all of the seed catalogs in the middle of winter, if I actually ever bought and planted all that I want in those catalogs I'd have to be living on a farm, a big farm. It's all about possibilities.

I'll go back to "weeding" tomorrow. Maybe it will get easier the more I do it.