Common and Rare

Every winter, I think about rearranging the more than three thousand books and two dozen bookshelves in this room. But other than minor changes — a stack here, a stack there — it ends up staying the way it is: familiar, visually pleasing, organized according to no specific plan other than a theme or author here and there, or a type of binding. If I’m counting correctly, I acquired forty-two books last year. Somehow, the room has absorbed them. The problem now is, if we’re to remove the old carpet and replace the flooring as we did in most of the rest of the house, which we would like to do, it presents us with a daunting task. Where do we put the shelves, where to we put the books, even for the day or two the job would take? This, of course, is what comes of having so many books. Yet there aren’t more than a handful I would care to part with, and even those have their place, in that they’re a reminder of where I’ve been and what I’ve thought when I was in the act of bringing them home. How many of these three thousand books do I truly need? None. I wasn’t born with them, and I won’t take them with me when I die. How many do I own? None. They are, for a time, simply in my care, the common and the rare. And all are common. And all are rare.

I saw no coyotes this morning, no dogs, no cats, and was met during my run by only one car. The neighbors four or five houses from us are moving away. Yesterday afternoon, there was a big moving truck in the driveway, and a small one was there on New Year’s Eve. Certainly what they’re going through is more difficult than moving a few shelves and three thousand books. My hope is that they want to move. They have several young children of the running and skating age, of the hide-and-seek age, at least two of which were born there. Their white birch tree was almost destroyed by the ice storm in 2021, and is slowly making a comeback. They planted tomatoes in pots. Wherever the family goes, and whatever their reason, they too are common, and they too are rare, whether they’re moving, like books, or sitting right there.

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