They Had Their Books, and I Have Mine

Take one husband who is unusually home-based after several out-of-town business trips have been cancelled/ postponed.   Add to that a child who loves the outdoors (and is not particularly fond of school).   Stir in record-high temperatures in January and a city where water is never far away, and in the middle of the afternoon, you get this:

 

I was invited, and every Drake-loving (as in the famed rapper’s mantra, “you only live once”), commercial-watching, family film hog would say, “Forget your responsibilities!   Go and feel the breeze in your hair and the wind in your face (not to mention the smell of fish in your nose).”   Honestly, the trip sounded increasingly as if it would pull me away from the tasks at hand for today (although hubby tried to accommodate by offering to bring a laptop).   I am also convinced that the pulls on a woman’s time as wife and mom are so very different than anyone else’s demands within the family until I offer no apologies for coveting the few hours I can get to do what I want/ need/ like to do: to think in a quiet space, to write, and to plan.

 

So, what am I thinking about?   My house–talk about pulls on a woman’s time.   I counted this morning, and it’s been 12 weeks–84 days, more or less–since our upstairs floors were re-done.   To date, we have restored our family room to its pre-move condition.

I am pleased–but yet, embarrassed–to say that we still have less than 100 books in the great room.

 

Even more embarrassing is the number of duplicates I have bought because I did not realize that we already had a copy here in the house.   Just today, our son noticed a copy of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, which he was forced to read for his college class on last semester.   If I were limber enough, I would have kicked myself in the rear–hard–when he mentioned that we bought his personal copy for school.   So hopefully, all of this cataloging will help us cease and desist from making these types of financial mistakes.

Perusing through each and every one of these books has  also reignited my curiosity for books that intrigued me at one time, but I never got around to reading them.   I am again committed to keeping a few books by the bedside and reading for 15-30 minutes for as many nights as I can.

 ‘Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.’–John Lubbock

Can’t wait to share what I’m reading, but I am also curious.   What’s in your personal reading basket?