Category: Uncategorized

There’s a long, narrow pantry off my kitchen.  I thought about posting a picture, but I’m afraid that making its state public would get me carted off to one of those hoarder intervention shows on cable TV.  I don’t really know the full extent of my hoardiness (that word being spelled carefully) because said panty comes complete with a sturdy door.  Out of sight, out of mind.

Unfortunately, the closed-door approach that has served me for over twenty years has become difficult.  In the process of purging an even longer span of classroom detritus, I wound up with a take-home pile of a dozenish boxes (mostly the kind that Lowe’s sells for 88 cents; I’ve long since discovered that it’s easier to buy boxes than to scavenge) in my living room:

The contents of some of those boxes (which I don’t need and probably shouldn’t have brought home in the first place) are going to have to go in the closed-door panty.  The pantry is full.  So, I find myself at an I-need-to-get-rid-of-stuff-before-I-can-store-more-stuff crossroad.  It’s a lot like having to empty the dishwasher before I can wash more dishes.  I don’t like emptying the dishwasher (that plastic stuff never dries, darn it) and I really don’t like cleaning pantries with decades of accumulation.  And people ask me how I’m enjoying retirement so far.

I found myself wandering from living-room pile to pantry door, hoping that I could come up with a more pressing project to facilitate procrastination.  And genius struck.  “I really need to add an entry to my blog,” I said to myself. Self smiled with relief.

Nevermind that I haven’t updated the old blog in nearly four years.  This is urgent writing going on. I’ll get to those boxes.  Someday.

There’s a bench in front of the library with my mother’s name on it. I don’t recall my mother ever being one to idle on benches (although she sometimes hinted of nights “sitting on the square” which was, I think, A Thing in the 50s), but I’ve always thought that there’s nothing more fitting to her memory than that bench.  It was given by her classmates, who apparently also remembered nights on the square in the 50s.

My mother loved that library. She was an every-other-Wednesday patron for years and years.  Once she sent me to return her books with the instruction “just tell them to give you something they think I’d like.” The librarian was helpful, but she admitted I was setting her a rough task.  Checking the file she said, “Dottie’s already read everything.”

I had a library card before I could read…maybe before I could walk.  Mother made sure of that.  And that, in a lifetime of gifts, was perhaps her greatest gift to me. I can’t say that I’m much of a library user these days; it’s too easy to download from Amazon without budging from my recliner. The love of pleasure reading, though, has been mine forever.  A gift.