It must be Spring.
This week I found myself on the floor, in front of my son’s bookshelves, clearing out and arranging.
The shelves were getting too squished, and they weren’t really… well, appealing. My theory is that books should be laid out like beautiful fruits, ripe for the picking.
His bookshelves were more like spinach and liver than blackberries and watermelon.
So I spent a bit of time parsing his book collection. I took out everything that was too young for him, or that I knew he’d never read. Then, because I’m a bit of a librarian at heart, I put all his collections together – all the Scooby-Doos, the Time Warp Trios, the Geronimo Stiltons.
The non-fiction books – dinosaurs and ancient Egypt, the joke books, the “How to be Immature” book – went on a separate shelf. And there’s also a shelf of “haven’t read, but isn’t this interesting” books. That’s for when he’s bored. He’ll stumble across that shelf and I’ll find him sitting in a chair, surrounded by books, reading.
A little Spring cleaning now… for a year-round harvest.
Sorry about the mixed metaphor in that last line; I don’t like it any more than you do. But sometimes it’s hard to come up with a good closer. Anyway, you know what I mean.
