We just had our basement finished. It doubled the square footage of our house.
There are only three people in my family, so we weren't put out with 1,000 square feet. We could still get away from each other and, while we tripped over the dog a lot, we didn't necessarily trip over each other.
But there are books. In fact, there are about 2,000 books.
Actually, no one knows how many books we have, so give or take a thousand.
I like to say my husband has never gotten rid of a book, but technically that's not true. Every few months, I point out some used-book sale seeking donations. He makes a cursory effort to weed through the stacks, I drop them off and life goes on.
Now it appears my son has inherited the book-hoarding gene.
I missed out on that trait. I check books out of the library, loan them out freely without worrying about if I'll ever see them again or just outright give them away. I figure once I've read a book, I've gotten the best it has to offer. After I suck out the information, the rest is just a shell.
But two-thirds of my family thinks differently.
Thus, one whole room of the "new" basement will be devoted to books.
There are still several other places around the house where books gather, of course, but many pieces of literature will now reside in "the library."
It's a cheery yellow room, with one whole wall devoted to built-in bookcases, a lifelong dream of my husband's. Two other walls have bookshelves he's moved from other parts of the house and one wall is a closet (with shelves filled with books).
The guys have been working for days, carrying books downstairs, then organizing and reorganizing them. There's a system I'm not quite up to speed on that involves organizing them by "ideas," like Thomas Jefferson did.
I was hoping at one point to maybe put a futon or something in that basement room, in case we ever have company. (Thus far, we've made our company sleep outside in a tent.) But now it looks like there won't be room for a futon.
And they continue to acquire. Just this week alone there was a book about an Ashcan exhibit we'd seen at the Detroit Institute of Arts and somebody snuck in a subscription to National Geographic.
I'm thrilled to pieces that we all like to read. My son won't leave the house without a book. He doesn't get sick in the car if he's reading, so he's a great traveling companion. He'll read and reread anything, no matter the genre, including, just this school year alone, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," "War and Peace" and all seven "Harry Potter" books (again).
My husband reads three or four books at the same time, plus multiple magazines and voluminous amounts of information off the Internet.
Then we talk about all of them.
So while the bound copies continue to pile up in the basement (and elsewhere), the souls of those books live on in our family.
Jodee Taylor can be reached at jtaylor@record-eagle.com.
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