(no subject)
I have new bookshelves, which is innocuous enough. I've been gradually collecting books scattered around the house and piling them in the living room by my new bookshelves, and shelving them a few at a time. (I have my own complicated sorting system that is based vaguely on size and color and guarantees an inability to find anything specific I might be looking for. It's a time consuming process to fit each book into its appropriate place with such a stringent filing system, so it's slow-going.)
I'm a natural bookworm, so being surrounded by books is the next best thing to paradise. (Paradise in my mind certainly consists of massive spaces piled haphazardly with books and smelling of aged paper.)
So perfectly happy times... and then I ran across a book of Granddad's. Someone, I think, had given it to him for his birthday, a few months before he died, and he'd been reading it there at the end. Just before he went to the hospital (unexpectedly), we were having breakfast together and he was talking about it. (And in the hospital he told me we'd have to push our regular breakfast for the week back until he was out again. It wasn't a brave face -- he'd every expectation of coming home, but as life goes, he didn't.) And sometimes little things bring it all back again, put me right back in that hospital room -- a cup of black coffee, a card from Monopoly, an unfinished book with a bookmark three-quarters of the way through...
I'm a natural bookworm, so being surrounded by books is the next best thing to paradise. (Paradise in my mind certainly consists of massive spaces piled haphazardly with books and smelling of aged paper.)
So perfectly happy times... and then I ran across a book of Granddad's. Someone, I think, had given it to him for his birthday, a few months before he died, and he'd been reading it there at the end. Just before he went to the hospital (unexpectedly), we were having breakfast together and he was talking about it. (And in the hospital he told me we'd have to push our regular breakfast for the week back until he was out again. It wasn't a brave face -- he'd every expectation of coming home, but as life goes, he didn't.) And sometimes little things bring it all back again, put me right back in that hospital room -- a cup of black coffee, a card from Monopoly, an unfinished book with a bookmark three-quarters of the way through...