We are slowly prepping for the big move across the Ohio, umm, to Ohio. [awk. be sure to come back and rework this] As I write this, I am sitting in my favorite room in the house: an office I share with Dr. Evil. All but about four feet of wall space in here is taken up by books, and by Jove, it just smells good when come in here. This is me, breathing in Tolkien and Melville, Dostoyevsky and Hiaasen (hey, a man needs his fun). When I moved myself here ten years ago, I only had my books, of course, and still I nearly killed myself after overpacking boxes to the point that they seemed to have their own gravitational pull. [everything has its own gravitational pull, please revise] Now, our books are happily co-mingled and even somewhat organized, but there are so many of them, with more arriving all the time. Add to this that Dr. Evil has been bringing even more books home from the office, as she will be a distance worker once we move. So. Many. Books. One positive is that the bougie Blue Apron boxes I was fretting about earlier are the perfect size for packing books—large enough to fit a few, but not so large that they should come with a coupon for a discount truss.

I was a fairly early adopter of the Kindle, so there are a number of books living in the ether and lightening our physical load, but even after several years with the Kindle, we still buy a good number of hard copy books. It’s difficult not to sometimes, when the prices are so similar. [yeah, keep rationalizing, pack rat] We have not done the smart thing like our friend Marie the Mad Librarian and made use of our local municipal library, but we aim to do more of that at the farm. You know, tomorrow.

Fac me bonum, o deus, sed nondum.

With the move growing closer by the day (we are told that a December handover of the new house to Dr. Evil’s folks is not out of the question), I keep returning to our little library to see what might be culled without too much pain. Friends, there is not much. Will I really be re-reading Francine Prose’s “A Changed Man” or Faulkner’s “The Reivers”? Probably not. But what if, man? What if? Add to this that there is no way to reasonably dispose of these books. Sadly, they have little value to anyone but me. I might be able to sell them to a used book store for pennies, or donate them to a charity that will probably cart them straight to the dumpster, and that just doesn’t sit well. I admire my in-laws, who set about replacing their most valued books with solid early editions and ditching the rest, but I’m just not there yet, ya know? Maybe after this move. Yeah, sed nondum.