The bane of the declutterer is the desire to find a loving home for all the discards. I myself suffer from this problem. Even though Flylady and her ilk urge us to LET GO, it's hard.
For me, it's especially hard with books. Most of the bookbuyers at the thrifts I habituate don't even look at the titles: they just scan with their phones, and wait for a "YES." But I have luckily found a few places where my books will find loving buyers.
First, I donate to the English Club at my place of employ. The money raised is used for travel to conferences.
When I went to the library today, I saw a sign that the Teen Club is collecting books for soldiers. What could be better than that?
Finally, Lucy Marmalade and the scholars in the "Fellows" program will be doing a three-week service project in rural Alabama, an area with over 50% adult illiteracy. The hardest books for me to unload are children's books. We are hoping that the library will take donations of books to be given away to children who participate in the program.
Last week I was playing with the tiny baby belonging to one of my students. The student was telling me that she loved to hold the baby while she fell asleep, even though all the books said it was wrong. ERGHHHH. I brought my very own copy of Penelope Leach's masterpiece to the next class. Finally, I found a good home for my beloved baby book.
I just packed up many books for the soldiers.
Free to a loving home.
What do you have problems with in the declutter department?
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Getting rid of books is huge. I can't bring myself to throw out a book, and I don't want to give them away, either.
To make things worse, a few years ago a widowed friend died. SDXB and I were cleaning out his apartment. The old guy had kept all his wife's books--she had advanced degrees in history and political science and then had gone to law school. She had a magnificent library. I waddled off with as many of her books as I could haul down the steps. This instantly restored my own library to its former, pre-divorce glory.
Ohhh gawd. I think I've read all of one of these tomes, if that many. They sit in bookshelves gathering dust, like my own books.
So I think of them as decorator items. They fill up blank walls. Filling the blank walls with decent artwork would cost at least as much as the books and bookcases cost. Right?
I used to think of them as a reference source for when I'm writing. That was true a dozen or more years ago. But now I use the internet for reference and hardly ever crack a book. It makes my writing more facile and (because I no longer walk out to the other room and search for the right source) my rear end more capacious, but for better or worse it does mean I hardly ever use those things.
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