The Library

I must admit that I am ashamed to show you the current state of my bookshelves. So, I have borrowed another man's flickered library to give you a visual. In spite of the dewey decimal system, the shelving of books is a very individual business. For example, we don't have a separate room for the library of books I've been collecting since childhood. And, I'm sad to say, I gave up on alphabetical ordering a long time ago.

For a while, I attempted to keep them ordered by function and then by size. My current system has been reduced to just keeping them on the shelves. In a family with so many children, our books are not just for looks or for study or even entertainment for the imagination on those rainy days when the electricity is out for hours. Our books are houses and roads. They are medicinal tools and improvers of posture.

In my home, books are used. A little too well, perhaps, for a librarian's taste. But, how can a mother possibly lament the reasons for returning to a bookshelf, where dust has no time to gather, for the umpteenth time this week to set them all in order before the next wave of curiosity comes to call?