Dispatches from a Wild Mind is a weekly Precipitate feature that explores the wild in place, nature, history, and art.
Dust clings like dandelion snow to cobwebs in places I hadn’t looked in nearly three years: the spaces behind overburdened bookshelves, hardbacks stacked in piles seven and eight high on tops of the bookshelves; in ceiling corners; beneath my childhood bureau, its mahogany finish scratched by the keys I keep there each night. One of these days, I’ll sand and refinish the bureau, varnish the bare-wood bookshelves. These items have moved with me from Pennsylvania to Texas, from there to Nebraska and Iowa. In a week, they’ll return to Nebraska with me in a U-haul.
In the meantime, I’m discovering the extent of what I’ve chosen to ignore: spring cleaning, the cellar spiders living in the out-of-sight recesses and dark corners. This morning, I stood beneath the sprinkler head in the bedroom and for the first time noticed the abandoned strands of cobweb like blond hair strung between it and the overhead light fixture in the center of the room. A soft breeze blew in through the open window. Looking at the gently swaying cobweb reminded me of laundry, the white sheets and T-shirts my mother and grandmother hung on clotheslines my grandfather had strung in the shape of a triangle between three large trees in the backyard. When one of the trees eventually fell, he sank a post in the soil in its place so we’d continue to have outside-dried laundry.
One of these days, I’d love to have my own clotheslines in the backyard. This move won’t allow for that, however, since it’s only temporary. I’m graduating and won’t be returning to Ames, Iowa, after my summer seasonal position as a park ranger in Nebraska ends. Where will I go after that? I can’t say. But it’s why I’m making decisions, dusting what I’m keeping and packing. My stuff-what little I don’t take with me to Agate Fossil Beds National Monument: a box or two of books, my laptop, sufficient clothes for a week or two at best-will end up in Omaha, the city from whence I came to Ames, the city through which I’m passing on my way west.
My challenge now is to decide what to keep, what to offer to others, what to discard. I hate waste. Fortunately, I grew up poor and never developed the habit to accumulate; thus, though I hate waste, I’m not a hoarder. Even when I earned $60,000-plus in the years before the housing bubble burst, I refused to acquire more than minimum needed to live comfortably: bed, bureau, futon, a green leather Relax-the-Back chair with an ottoman, a TV and surround sound system, CDs and DVDS, clothes, food, car. My one extravagance? Books.
As I look now at my walls lined by bookshelves, I can’t help but feel like I’ve become one of the farmers Henry David Thoreau referred to in “Walden”: a man who’s a slave to his possessions. What possessions did Thoreau refer to? Cattle, of course. For me, my cattle are books. Since middle school, I’ve collected all sorts: mysteries and thrillers, science fiction and fantasy, literary novels, poetry and short fiction, military histories, and books on anthropology, science, business, and psychology, among other topics. Everywhere I’ve moved I’ve accumulated more and, with them, more bookshelves, where dust and cellar spiders settle in the cobwebs spun between the bookshelves, between the bookshelves and the walls, between the stacked piles of books, between the stacked books and the walls.
Some things I can get rid of: three inexpensive bookshelves, pots and pans, a thirty-year-old globe, two chairs, an electric razor, a dart board, board games, some tools, clothes that no longer fit. These books, though-not many. I suspect I could read two of the ones I already have each week for the rest of my life, live to be at least 80, and still not read all that I have and haven’t yet read. Perhaps I should learn from my cellar spiders. When no longer useful, their webs are abandoned.
For now, I’ve convinced myself I can part with two or three dozen books at most from among the thousand-plus I have (I’ve never counted them). That’s about a box’s worth. The rest I’ll continue to dust and pack. Until summer ends and I know where I’ll be going (hopefully somewhere permanent), the boxes will be stacked on pallets in a storage unit; they’ll outnumber what little furniture I have by at least five or six to one. While they’re there, in the dark, I hope cellar and other spiders move in and stitch together the boxes. Until I can retrieve them, I’ll want the spiders to guard my books from silver fish and other harmful and destructive insects and pests.
Fred MacVaugh, Staff Blogger