The Cerebral Mum

I’m in the middle of moving house and it’s not an out- of-here into-there kind of deal. The house I own is already empty (of people, at least) and Cas and I are living in my sister’s spare room until it is renovated and sold. My things currently have no home so I have to pack everything away for what may continue to be months (renovating is a slow process with a ten month old) and scale down my three-bedroom, double-garage, outdoor-entertaining contents to suit a city-size apartment.

No problem there. I can’t wait to be living close to the people who know how to make coffee again. The problem is that when I said three-bedroom, it was slightly misleading. My master bedroom hasn’t been a master bedroom since I moved in. The first thing I did was rip out the built-in robes to make room for The Library.

I have books. I’m not sure how many. I stopped counting a while ago.

Now, there is no chance on this green earth that my (partially Dewey Decimal catalogued) book collections will be scaled down but I can’t keep them with me while I’m in the in-between. They have to be boxed up and put into storage. I’m not a particularly dependent person but this process seems to engender a great deal of anxiety in me. What if I need one of them?

I have the capacity to be a very efficient person (Yes, Mum. I do.) but this particular part of packing up my life has been trying.

Yesterday I packed three boxes. Three boxes should take, say, ten or fifteen minutes all up? Unless of course you’re me and each one takes over an hour. Surely I could justify holding on to just this one? And that one… And that one…

There were a few I had no problems boxing. The red velvet covered book of love potions someone gave me? Nope. Don’t need that. The Complete Family Guide to Natural Healing? A quick flick through it, just in case. Herbs for anorexia and and go smell a flower, it will make you feel better? Nope. Don’t need that. Thomas Shelton’s 1612 translation of Don Quixote de la Mancha? No, thank you. As a mum I get more than my fair share of scatological humour daily. Into the box with you.

But then there were the more obscure things like Back to Basics and the time it took me to convince myself I didn’t need to know how to pasteurise my own milk or build a self-composting dunny if I was moving back to the inner city.

Or there was my Asana Dialogue which, when abridged, went something like this:

Hatha Yoga?
=> No. You just joined a gym.
But it doesn’t have yoga classes.
=> You have a DVD.
But…
=> No.
I could feature a posture each week on my blog…
=> Your blog is not about yoga.
I could use the symbolism of each asana to discuss different aspects of…
=> No. No. No.

Pausing to consider the fat Genet biography I’ve yet to get around to reading was perhaps more reasonable. It didn’t smack quite so much of desperation. But why does not having all my books on hand or, at least, just around the corner, make me feel so desperate?

Well you see, right here is where I would mention a passage from a novel. The narrator grew up in a house where the all the walls were lined with books, as I did, and she remembers wondering as a child, when she visited bookless homes, what it was that held the walls up. And that is symbolism which resonates with me.

But I can’t share that passage (which I think is in Joanna Murray-Smith’s Truce) because the book is locked away in a cage made of cardboard and packaging tape.

You never know which book you might need.

There is a happy ending though. I kept aside three books while packing my three boxes. The Penguin Opera Guide and Prima Donna: A History, which I need as reference materials for my own novel, and Wallace Stevens: The Collected Poems, a book I will be using to write a weekly feature on my blog, unlike the awful asana disaster.

I think three books for three boxes is fair. So I’ve made a deal with myself and tomorrow when I’m packing I get to hold on to fifteen extra books to make up for the boxes already lining the hallway.

The Camus doesn’t count of course. There can never be a cardboard cage for him.