Our first home together was a 1930’s bungalow, the only remaining vestige of a farm in Crozet, Virginia. When we moved in, then, had 50 nearly-new spec homes around it, transforming it from a charming farmhouse into the gangly outlaw of the neighborhood. In exchange for reduced rent, we stripped wall-paper and sanded floors and painted trim. We also added a pull-down staircase into the attic in a harried attempt to compensate for the hole our friend made in the ceiling as he foist our boxes up into “storage.”
Most of those boxes were Nate’s; I brought only a small dowry to our union. I thought he must be a pack rat, then (you know, all those guesses you make about this person who’s ring you’re wearing but of whom you still barely know). Poetry anthologies and historical biographies and more works of C.S. Lewis than I knew he wrote. We loaded up that cob-webbed crawl-space in the ceiling with box after box of books that didn’t have titles like “Growing Your Heart for God,” which were the only kind of books that I read at that time. The attic concealed them, so I ignored them.
When we moved again three years later into the home that didn’t have an attic, but a basement, and one into which we walked through every day from our garage up to the first floor, I remembered the books. The boxes of books. “Can’t we just sell them?” I inquired with an added edge. I now knew … {continue reading over here —>}
