Boxes Of Books

When I was in Seattle in the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2008, I got rid of something like three hundred books which my buddies at the Blue House in Ballard had been storing for me in three identical IKEA bookcases (I had another one upstairs in the cloud room, also full to bursting) along with almost everything else I owned. I wasn’t completely crazy though: I saved out a couple of boxes of my old kids’ books to be sent home to my mom in Miami, and another couple to be sent out to me here, when I got settled. They’ve been in my cousin’s garage since August of 2008 and finally a couple of weeks ago when my mom went out to that same cousin’s wedding she took it upon herself to send them to me. They finally arrived yesterday.

You can only imagine how excited I was to see them on the doorstep—I mean I didn’t even remember what was in them anymore, it had been so long. It was better than opening presents at Christmas because everything was completely new and everything was familiar at the same time. I’m on my second book since yesterday and am anticipating a very happy couple of weeks as I make my way through them all. I can’t wait to have them all arranged on bookshelves along with the others I’ve picked up in the last eighteen months or so.

What was I thinking, when I packed them? Why did I choose what I chose? I had to laugh a little when I saw that I’d put in an Italian phrasebook—not a dictionary, as may have been useful in the bilingual household I thought I’d be starting back then—but the phrasebook I took with me to Italy in 1998 with my friend Marah, the first time I went. I saved out my old ragged red-covered Grimm’s Fairy Tales but not, for some reason, the Italian Folk Tales edited by Italo Calvino, which I love with all my heart, even more than Grimms. A couple of novels that are…fine interesting books, of course, but have no special meaning to me and that I could get at the Wellington library if I felt the need. The first two years of this blog in paperback form that Anna gave me for my thirtieth birthday. My tenth and eleventh grade copies of The Catcher In The Rye and To Kill A Mockingbird with their plain maroon and yellow eighties’ covers. Several sets of short stories, including the first work by a New Zealand author I ever read, way before I ever thought of coming to New Zealand myself.

Reading over that old entry from when I was packing up the books—putting in my residency application, trying to get around Seattle without a car, getting ready to go back to Miami, Skypeing with Darfur—it’s so strange to think that at the time I was not sure if I would be able to come back to New Zealand. It depended on so many things that felt so out of my control. I worried about it all the time, for months, and it’s all I could talk about, boringly. It’s hard to recall, now: sitting on my couch in front of a late-winter-almost-spring fire, flatmates away, open boxes of books in front of me—what a huge risk I was taking. Getting rid of the books—I still remember having to have to lie down and cry every hour or so as I shoveled them all into their boxes and then trucked them down to the U District Half Price Books–meant I was really leaving for real this time, that it wasn’t just a year abroad, not just an Overseas Experience.

And getting them back, then, the books I would have very carefully and considerately decided to save out—what does that mean? I would like to think that it means that I have settled, a little, that I have found a home here. I’ve been back in Wellington long enough that I don’t even think of it as being back anymore, I’m just here, the same way I’ve been in any other city for any other amount of time. My stuff’s here, at least—in addition to these two boxes of books pretty much everything else I own in the world is here: nice new pots and pans, a bed and four sets of sheets, what feels like eight hundred pairs of black shoes. All sorts of stuff, most of which I will probably get rid of again at some point, because that’s what people do over time. Home becomes wherever you are, scaffolded by the things and people you love, some of which are easy to let go and some of which are harder. That’s not a new sentiment, for me or anyone else. Everyone knows that. I know it too; over and over again I know it.

It’s been a hard couple of weeks. A hard month, if I’m honest. So much has happened, so much is changing, but all I can do at the moment is dip into these boxes, bring up the old loves, and sit in front of the fire, reading old books that feel new again, in the new place that feels old.