Feels like forever since I was here. Had some work done in the house and so my office was incommunicado and then after the work was done I needed to recuperate from the work. Not that I did much of it. Although I pride myself on a bit of painting, which, I swear I don’t understand how anyone can actually enjoy doing. As if colour selection isn’t crazy-making enough, the taping and spilling and wiping that goes on, the tedium of painting edges and around windows and baseboards. I know, I know, some people find it meditative and I love meditation so believe me I tried to find the zen, but I prefer my trances to include comfy cushions and closed eyes.

All this work required things taken off shelves, filing cabinets emptied so they could be moved, closets, drawers, all kinds of removal and boxing up and then putting back. The best part of which is that you never put back exactly what you take out… if all goes well, there is quite an enormous difference in fact, with a load of bags and boxes to give away or shred.

So now I’m not even sure what’s making me happier, the new floors, the new wall colour, or the new ‘space’ everywhere. Not that I went all KonMari or anything, I did NOT, but I did discard the stuff that was (literally) blocking me from seeing the actual stuff I like or need to see or from reading the books I have that were so deeply stacked everywhere that I could hardly be bothered to approach any one stack, preferring, instead, the easier (and so very sweet) route of just buying new books. (To then read and/or stack, because they had nowhere else to live….)

The biggest difference (apart from having a functional office) is that my bookshelves are now welcoming spaces (to me and to new books) rather than overstocked storage areas and the best unexpected gift of all this is how the organization of it makes me feel like I suddenly live in my very own bookshop, a place that welcomes browsing, with titles you can read and books that you can easily find and take from the shelf.

I’ll admit that I do have a ‘new’ stack of books… (let’s not be coy, I’ll always have a stack of books)… but these are titles from my own shelves, happy surprises that emerged from the cleansing to say hello! you’ve always meant to read me, remember????

And I’m getting through this stack with such pleasure! The weight, the literal weight of so much unorganized and unread accumulation having been lifted is liberating. (And please understand, I still have shelves and shelves of hundreds of books… books that I actually want.)

The first of the ‘new’ stack that I read was a cloth bound 1937 edition of Letters to a Friend, by Winnifred Holtby, which I bought very many moons ago at Hannelore’s (an absolute brilliant fixture of a second hand book shop in St. Catharines). (The copy is marked with a stamp indicating it was once property of the Naval Vessels Reading Service in Halifax… one of the best things about second hand books is what you find in them.)

Winnifred Holtby was a feminist, a socialist, a pacifist, and pals with Vita Sackville West, Vera Brittain and Leonard Woolf, though these letters are written to Jean McWilliam, whom she met during her time with the WAACs. McWilliam is referred to as ‘Rosalind’ and Holtby signs off as ‘Celia’, a reference to the cousins in Shakespeare’s  As You Like It.

Here is a good outline of the book.

For my part I’ll leave you with a snippet, from the opening page where, in the very first letter to ‘Dearest Rosalind’, there is this… (which, if I should ever receive the like in a letter from anyone, I will insist that person never ever stop writing me letters.)

“The roads were fine and hard, made for walking, spreading themselves across the hills, and opening out at the crossways to tempt us on. We talked about burlesques an school discipline and Dostoevsky and porridge, and whether bread and cheese and beer are really better than stuffed olives and champagne, and neckties and dons and all the thousand and one silly things that one talks about on a long morning when the air is frosty and the roads are dry.”

And, for the record, based on the above, (I mean, Dostoevsky and porridge??? ) this is someone I would dearly love to have walked with.

♦

More excavations to follow.