Boy, you know you're blending your life with someone when you reorganize the books.
I've always kind of thought that books we've dragged through moves and changes are those we especially like and use. I mean, why would we go to the effort otherwise? Books are friends we reach for when we want comfort and information, or just want to again feel the leather of the fraying spine as we find a favorite passage or long forgotten bookmark.
Books of my dad's - those written by him and read by him - sit next to treasured compilations of Shakespeare and Homer and Dickens. Bibles, bibles, everywhere: big ones, small ones, pocket ones, ones missing spines from generations of use. Little bound books of poetry from girlhood and first editions of children's books - Robert Louis Stevenson and Aesop's fables - and the generations of telling and re-telling the magic inside, father to daughter, mother to son.
Look at the spines! The Rolling Stones and Beatles, space flight and war, atlases, American coins and Baseball (cards, collectibles, folklore, and fame) right next to Chaucer and Keats, Astronomy and antique watches, gardening, the Tolkien trilogies and Hoyle. It all fits.
We will come here again and again to pull from the shelves, visit and take comfort from the books we know and learn those we have not met. We will see the things that shaped each other's lives. Which book will I start with, I wonder, to pull from the shelves and discover more about his history and interests and passions? Coins, I am thinking: definitely coins.
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