While I Wasn’t Looking

While I wasn’t looking, things changed, time passed, and books accumulated. And accumulated. Now, books lie stacked on my carpet, newly released from their box prisons and I wonder, Where do they go from here?

Used to be, books, I mean actual pick-it-up-in-your-hands books, were my mainstay. Now, everything from fiction to how-to information, can be found on the Internet. So, who needs books any more? The answer to that, it seems, is I do.

Since my move from Oklahoma, excess books have resided in boxes in my garage. They were spill-overs. Every book shelf in the house was full and over-flowing, so there was nowhere else for these poor, hapless books to go. But, lately, I’ve been afraid they might be getting moldy or in some way, harmed, so I dug them all out, lugged them into the front room, and started going through them. They look brand new, as crisp and clear as when I boxed them up. There must be 200 of them, just from the boxes. They are fiction and non-fiction, history, poetry, mysteries, health-related, biographies, and a few very old readers. 

So, now, what in the world do I do with them? Nobody seems interested. Never mind that there’s a wealth of information between all those pages. They take up space and, in some cases are out-dated. Take, for instance, this very old children’s reader. Years ago, this book was important to me and many other children. We learned to read in such books as this. Now, I’m not sure how youngsters are taught. They learn to read, write, do math, and many other things and they are real whizzes, but I guarantee you they did not learn from books such as these.

So, while I wasn’t looking, my book collection grew and grew and grew and now, I suppose it’s obsolete. It’s still dear to me, but I’ll never be able to use them again. Not all of them. So, I suppose I’ll sort them, re-package and re-cycle, somehow. Not sure how, but they are still books; they still represent a lot of knowledge and, to me, they’re still valuable. Surprising, how fast things change!