Books
When I came to this country in 1995, I shipped 7 cardboard moving boxes by sea. 4 were books. 3 were everything else.
The first thing I built, when I had my first, own, one bedroom apartment in Baltimore, was a bookshelf, carefully ordering my now growing number of books along the wall of my study, and writing desk space.
When we bought our house in Buffalo, NY in 2002, I built a library, where we combined our now substantial number of books: fiction, nonfiction, educational, paperbacks, hardcover, everything. The library was in our basement, the entire length of the house, and half of one side; floor to ceiling. We had even an additional library in our living room, just one wall, but all the books that mattered to the family were on that wall.
- Since I was a kid, books had been my joy.
2010 we lost our house, and with it, many of the books. We gave them away, as we had to downsize. About half went with us to Toronto, Canada, where I recreated one wall of books, a smaller L-shaped library, in our family room, again downstairs.
2014 we had to leave again, again having to get rid of most of our remaining books - this time, all of our educational books were given away; everything that had made me a teacher.
We arrived in Florida, where there are no basements, and the book boxes went into a storage unit, which we paid for every month, for eight years. Then we had a few hard months in 2022, and we were late with paying for the storage unit. 26 days. Not even a month. 26 days that we didn’t even know about, as we had hurricane Ian during those very days, and we hadn’t looked at our mail; but they already had tried to auction our unit anyway, and when they couldn’t, they took everything to the county dump - where it vanished between all the hurricane waste; including our children’s beautiful, hand-made full-size childhood beds.
When I came, I had seven boxes; four were books.
I now have less.