Our remodeling project is almost done. Yesterday afternoon, Don delivered a multitude of present-wrapped shelves to go in the new bookcases. He had unwrapped the shelves, festooning brown paper around the room, and installed them where he thought we might like them. It was a great starting place.
Already occupying pride of place, front and center over the fireplace, was a photograph my dad took in the 1940s. It’s a black-and-white image of students hustling across the Diag of the University of Michigan, lit by shafts of sunlight on a brisk autumn day. It is an iconic image of the excitement of fall on a university campus. It is still published from time to time—as are a number of Dad’s images—and distinguished visitors to the university’s Bentley Historical Library receive a copy. The new family room shelves were designed to show off that photograph, and they do.
Next to find places in the new shelves were the tomes on physics and optics and mathematics that constitute my husband’s light reading. He has, over the years, declined to offer any guidance on the order in which such books should be shelved. Alpha by author by subject? And what about the subjects themselves? Where does Quantum Field Theory go relative to Algorhythmics? He says he likes how I shelve his books but, then, he also spends time with a book called Chaos, which is how I would sum up the current shelving arrangement. Maybe it’s like moving pieces of art around periodically; it allows you to see old friends anew.
He also declines to have all of his technical volumes consolidated in the new shelves. He prefers that the ones in his study remain where they are. “I like to read upstairs,” he says. Where a book is shelved does not dictate where it must be read, I point out, but he prefers the status quo in this regard. He did let me move the books from the closet of his study, and the ones he had at his office have shelf space now, too.
Next came the books of fiction that have been sitting around in grocery bags. Several grocery bags. Our friend Mary offered me first refusal of some books she was going to donate, some months back. And it turns out that Mike and Mary’s taste in fiction is very similar to ours. I didn’t take all the books, but I did take quite a few. After all, the new shelves were in the offing. The new books are on those shelves now, along with other works of fiction from upstairs closets. They’re arranged alphabetically by author, just like the fiction collection upstairs.
“Will it bother you that now some work by an author might be upstairs, and more by that same author might be downstairs?” I asked my sweetheart. “Not a bit,” he answered. “Would you like me to consolidate all of a given author?” “Not a bit,” he answered. The man is comfortable with both chaos and two alphabets. No wonder people are always telling me how nice he is.
The other features built into the new shelves are room for art and room for unfilled space. The shelves are of varying widths and variable heights. I spent yesterday evening moving shelves up and down to create custom niches for favorite objects—objects of art and memory, objects of graceful shape and pretty color. The crystal vase my all-time-favorite boss and his lovely wife gave us when we married. Mom and Dad’s sculpture of a giraffe family. A ceramic Cerberus. An orange tumbler from the glassblower Up North. A green glass pyramid a daughter gave us. I see the shelves as a rotating exhibit, a perpetual work in progress.
The art was back up on the walls, with some revisions, before the shelves arrived. It was wonderful to have our old friends with us again after the construction. Somehow that, and filling the shelves, make the new-and-improved room real. When the walls were bare and the shelves empty, the room was still potential, not yet realized. It had great lines and proportions. It was a peaceful space. Repeatedly, I found myself just sitting there enjoying it, with no TV, no handwork, no reading matter. I still do that, but the filled-up room is incorporated into the house and our lives now. It shares our back story—there it is on the walls and shelves—and we share its future. It feels like us.
Now, we have to decide what to put in all the new cupboard space.
14 January 2022