Becoming the Books

Artist : Andre Martins de Barros

Ed and I had just finished eating at 8:30 this evening and all I wanted to do was get my post up--which was going to be my first reading challenge for 2011--but first I had to plug in my clock and find space for the books I'd brought home from the library yesterday. The clock task was supposed to take five minutes or less but it involved excavating for the power strip and that involve some minor clutter patrol so it took twenty minutes.

I had no problem finding space for the books and DVD I checked out yesterday as they just slipped into the slots left behind but the stuff returned. But when it came to the six books I bought of the Friends of the Library shelf.... Well that was a whole other story.

That involved pulling books and other things off the shelf next to my pillows under a ledge that is easy to bump my head on and is dark as a cave unless I move the pillows and shams filled iwth quilts that serve to prop me to sit up in bed. So there I was laying stretched out on the bed reaching back behind my head pulling books and misc out of the cave and piling the behind me until they were toppling and piling them in front of me until they threatened to fall off the bed and then resorting to piling them on myself along my hip and thigh and ribs on my right side as I lay on my left side.

And in the middle of all this Merlin decided he just had to get to his window perch on the ledge above my head and his best path was me. He walked up my right leg to the first small stack of paperbacks and was about to climb it when my startled yelp gave him pause and my stern 'OFF' backed him off.

At that point I had to pause and lay back to completely rest my arms and I became fully cognizant of the sensation of being buried by books or possibly composed of books. Or maybe a bit of both.

And then I made the sad acknowledgment that any books I squirreled away in this cave now would have the same fate as those I'd last put there--the very ones I was now pulling out in order to rearrange and/or redistribute to make room for the newest six--nearly six months ago.

So I've now commenced another round of soul searching and re-evaluation of my relationship to my books.

But it will probably end in the same place it always does.

I am who I am and it is what it is.

BTW it was after 11 when I got the bed cleared and put back together and by then Ed had fallen asleep in the living room recliner while watching Netlix online and I had to keep after him for another half an hour to wake up and get his self and his stuff move back to the room.

And it is now almost 2am as a prepare to click 'publish post' and I haven't even started crocheting on the baby afghan so it is going to be hard to get Tuesday's quota of 4 done by dawn. This morning before I slept I had actually crocheted five rows since waking on Monday but got to count only two towards the quota as I had removed three of them including one of them twice! I am am soooo behind on it now. At least half a week. I'm a few inches into row 43 and by Thursday dawn I should be on row 66. One 36 inch row takes me on average an hour.