We Have Moved!

Last post in the on-going saga of Debra and Tony and their search for somewhere for them and their books to settle in.  Last Thursday we closed on the house and moved our furniture to 1400 Willow.  Our email addresses and cell phone numbers are the same, but the 456-1865 number is defunct.  (if you need new phone numbers, send me an email.) One of the happy consequences of this move is that we have severed our connections with Time Warner!

We are almost (superficially) settled in and will leave for the Lake next Tuesday, arriving Thursday June 2, at which point I hope to resume my regular blogging life!

We are happy to be where we are and where we will be, but we are EXHAUSTED.  Moving is not for the old or weak!

Celebratory champagne and caviar at our new home!

#1400Willow
#Moving

The Lives of Books

When I retired two years ago, I had about 400 books in my office.  I started getting rid of them a few years before retirement by giving each student a book at the end of the semester as a gift.  I then gave the rest of the books to the UofL English Graduate Organization (EGO) for their book sale.

This last few weeks, we have been readying our house to sell.  As part of that I had to reduce the number of books I had at our large house to the much smaller number of books I could keep in the condo.

At the house, I had about 1000 books--ten book cases that held about 100 books each.  Tony has a comparable number.  We decided we could each have 3 bookcases at the condo.  So I had to downsize from 1000 to about 300 books. Which to keep and which to give away?

About half of my home books were novels--mostly gifts Tony has given me over our life together.   The other half was part of my professional library: books about critical theory, rhetoric, composition pedagogy and evolutionary biology;

Most of the novels I had read.  I had to carefully choose those that were most important.  The rest, I took out the first page which held a dedication and wrote the name of the book and author on it. The professional books were those I had read mainly for particular research projects--the kind of research I no longer plan to do.

How did I decide which books to keep and which to give away?   I chose novels that have been especially meaningful for me--harkening to points in my life that were shaped by particular books, or books whose meanings I continue to carry with me. The professional books I kept were those that had most deeply defined my ideas.  But those decisions were difficult and even painful.  I've lived my life surrounded by books, and they are valuable and evocative to me, even if already read,  I cannot imagine living anyplace that didn't have books.  Our house at the lake has several bookcases as well.

Now most of my books have gone to EGO for their fund-raising sale.  And I suppose they will then continue to fulfill their main function: being read.  But their physical presence--their weight, heft, and color remains a loss.

I am not alone in my saving books over a lifetime.  It's not a sensible decision, because we will never read them all again or for the first time. But we have a hard time letting go.  For many people, their books define who they are.

#books
#moving

I Am Stressed

I feel completely disoriented.  Our house is a mess.  Downstairs, we  have workers in almost every day: stripping wallpaper, prepping walls, applying plaster to ceilings, eventually painting, repairing electrics, removing carpet.  Upstairs, I am going through about 800 books, trying to reduce them to 300.  Going from 9 bookcases to 3, and that's not counting Tony's books, which is totally his problem!  I have gone through layers and layers of our and my parents' shared histories, reducing about 12 boxes of memorabilia to 6.  I have gotten rid of all kinds of clothes I no longer wear.  I am constantly organizing and throwing away. Next weekend is "Junk PickUp" for our neighborhood, when we can put anything out (except computers), and it will be carted away.  By next weekend, all the "stuff" from the garage, basement, and attic will be gone.

The house no longer seems ours.

Three weeks from today I am going to Budapest.  It seemed like such a good idea in December, before we had found even one condo that suited our needs. I plan to have a very good time and leave all this behind.  Definitely.

My current plan is to have everything weeded out before we leave.  When we come back April 1, we will own the condo.  We will then "stage" the house, by taking everything our realtor wants out of the house to the condo.  Directly after that, the house will go on the market, and we will then live in a denuded house, until it sells.

I am stressed.  I am excited.  But I am stressed.  I try in my mind to place our furniture in the condo,, but even with pictures and drawings and measurements, I can't figure out what will go where.  I am stressed.

I am also excited.  I know that by sometime this spring or summer, we will have achieved what we have been wanting for two years: to sell our house, to move into something smaller and easier to care for, and to live in Louisville in a new way.  Still I am stressed,


#BuyingaCondo
#Stressed
#Moving