By Todd Robin Nelson

We are packing. Again. This means downloading a considerable number of bookshelves and their contents into cardboard boxes. And books, I am thinking, as I fill those boxes, are a complete geography of my personal history, the repository of a miscellany of lives.

One would think, from the ages and eras comprised in my book collection, that I had never given a book away once it entered the Nelson family library. Packing and moving is a chore, to be sure. Here is my college English major collection, side by side with my English teaching career collection, beside the books of childhoods—mine, my parents, my children—and the arc of location and relocation from coast to coast and various stints and stays.

This makes packing a reunion with old friends and former selves, and a review of a lifetime of reading habits. When the books are sitting on the shelves, they are silent. When they are being carefully sorted and packed for a move, they begin to speak. Like today.

It’s odd, in an era when most of my books are available online, as most of my collection is literature and poetry, to think that carting around stacks of paper makes any sense. And yet these are indeed old friends. They are my back pages of location, development, thinking, ambition, and tender affinities. They are the bookmarks of my life.

Here is the book of London street maps from the early 1970s when our family lived there and I was an American high schooler, liberated from American suburbia and free to explore the worldly metropolis. Later came the map books of France, Scotland, regions of the U.S., each summoning a pang of longing for their blue highways and meals and local colors.

Here are the childhood books of my parents, which have been ceded to succeeding generations, artifacts of a family lore of reading nearly a century old. I notice my childish scrawl on the title page of Lone Cowboy, a favorite of my mother’s: Todd Robert Nelson. I was in the phase of eschewing my actual middle name in favor of my father’s.

Here are the poetry anthologies from college, way marks of an English major and path toward teaching and writing. And then volume after volume of slender collected, selected, and new poems by a myriad of authors. My tastes are showing. Each index is annotated; table of contents starred—a running record of what I liked and when.

As I put the books into boxes their covers and dog-eared pages create mini-reunions. Here is e.e. cummings, the big red collected poems that was my first personal acquisition, a Christmas present when I was in high school. Here goes Dylan Thomas, a personal favorite ever since Mr. Walker’s English class. Yeats and William Stafford go into the box, with Wendell Berry and Philip Booth, who was once our neighbor in Castine. Along comes Billy Collins and the poets to whom he introduced me when he was poet laureate: Ron Koertge, Dana Gioia, Louis Jenkins.

The poets of teaching—authors of poems that made a particular point for a particular class of mine about “how a poem means” (poet John Ciardi’s phrase), or the music of words, or the taut rhetoric of sense and sensibility (that’s the name of an anthology). Richard Wilbur (my copy of his selected poems is signed to my father—they must have met for an interview), Ceslaw Milosc, Seamus Heaney. There is no rhyme or reason here, except as my bookshelf exhibits the mosaic of my understanding and worldview.

Eclectia: Wendy Cope, Virginia Hamilton Adair, Charles Simic (“Breasts!”). Borges. Garcia Lorca. Sharon Olds, Naomi Shihab Nye. I am in the audience again at a hundred readings, videos, podcasts, talks. How will I ever get any packing done with these interruptions. And there are still the non-fiction and art books and photo album shelves to stow.

Doesn’t everyone have all of Shakespeare’s plays, in single volume complete works as well as the individual plays? You don’t have five years worth of Poetry magazine? How do you live without bookshelves lined with verse….just in case you need to dig out an evasive line or mot juste.

Our moving truck will carry mostly books, it seems. In transit, I will be mulling this recent rendez-vous, rolling the titles over on my tongue with new savor, a bit of nastalgia, and longing. And when the boxes open and it’s time to reshelve them in a new home, it’ll be déjà lu all over again.

Todd R Nelson is Principal of Brooksville Elementary School in Brooksville, Maine.