My Mother’s Books
How shelving my inheritance is monumental
My mother’s books lived in big rubber bins in the basement, not the well-organized bins with labels from the label maker, but the reject bins, the ones missing lids, the ones with “Christmas decorations” scrawled across the sides, the ones that were a little faded, a little used, a little out of shape. My mother’s books occupied the big rubber bins in her basement, mostly because she was always in the middle of one renovating project or another and had never quite gotten around to reshelving them. My mother’s books rested in big rubber bins in the basement in unsteady towers that, after her death, came to me.
Her death coincided with my husband and I moving into the first house that was “ours.” She passed away a few months after we moved in, which brought a halt to our unpacking. My father then moved and many of the boxes of my mother’s books moved into my house, sitting in their rubber bins, waiting for me to have the strength of will to sort them, to shelve them, to delve into what I, as a career English professor, saw as a physical piece of my mother’s mind and heart. It took me over a year to do this, to crack into the three intellectual histories piled in the front room of the house: mine, my husband’s, my mother’s.
Let me start by stating the obvious. We had to buy more shelves. We packed ourselves into the trusty Subaru and went off to Ikea, jamming ourselves (jammed with Swedish treats from the café) and three large Billy bookcases into the car, laughing hysterically at the need to fold seats, to remove headrests, to carry on conversation over three large boxes while navigating Friday afternoon traffic out of College Park. To add to the hysteria, we then had to carry three large, long, and heavy boxes up the three narrow flights of stairs to the top tower room of our townhouse, which we had, in our genius, decided to use as the library.
I will continue to state the second obvious point: I absolutely procrastinated doing this with a trip to Ikea, wandering through the store and imagining my life in each little capsule of a room. I came back home to absolutely my own life: two dogs clamoring to eat the Ikea boxes, what seemed like tons (I am not kidding; it probably is tons) of books wearing down the untrod carpet of our front room, and the heavier weight of grief sitting on my heart. I knew this was not going to be easy.
At her funeral, as I stood up on the altar giving her eulogy, I wanted nothing more than to share what made her herself; I told her collected mourners about a prayer book she had, which unexpectedly, was not a prayer book someone else had written, with hymns and pre-packaged prayers, but a lengthy journal kept over decades with lists of people to pray for, some of them with stories, some just as names, but, nevertheless, a constant recognition that she kept her promise to every story she heard: she prayed for them. She read books searching for just the right thing to tell them. She repeated their names every day, connecting them to herself, to God, and to the author whose words she had searched out for them. It was a divine web of words.
The first thing I did after the formalities of family and funeral were gone was to look for some way to talk to her again. I found myself listening to the last voicemail she left on repeat, watching the short video she had sent me the year before on my phone of her, in a rain hat and clogs, stomping in puddles and singing a song she used to sing to me as a kid (my mom was a trip). I just wanted to connect. I wanted words. We had shared so many.
I inherited my mother’s words: the prayer journal, the rosaries pressed with repeated phrases, the handwritten notes, the text messages, the voicemails, the rubber bins of books from the basement, the well-worn copies of Dante, of Stoddard, of Angelou, of Alcott, of Lowell, of Shakespeare, of Plato, of Gilbert, of Thurman, of Aurelius.
This inheritance of words also carried the weight of my mother’s annotations; she didn’t just read a book any more than she just carried on small talk. Each well-read volume is full of notes, scribbled in margins and of brightly colored post-its and scraps of paper; it was conversation to just lift a volume out of those bins, to smooth the cover, to touch the ink.
If asked to describe the genre of reading she most liked, my mom would reply, “Self-help.” For my mother, all reading was Self-help, from titles like 60 Things to Do When You Turn 60 to Lives of the Saints to Paradise Lost. Thrust into an English department, my mother would clearly be anti-canonical arguing that anything could be a text. (Apologies to Harold Bloom.)
It is, however, this self-genrefication that sent my mother’s books to the bins in the basement. My mother’s books were relegated to big rubber bins in the basement because the “Self-help” label devalued them to their dilapidated bins, caught in literary purgatory during home renovations, trapped in Rubbermaid limbo because the house had to look “just so” for a party that she, a home design perfectionist, never managed to have. (Her notes on Virginia Woolf give me goosebumps.)
She often spoke with deep regret and discomfort about her inability to shelve her books, about how relieved she would be when she could, about how she wanted them organized so she could find the perfect passage, about how like a garden it would be.
Which brings me to where I am, sitting in front of a rubber bin, so filled to the brim with words that it doesn’t have a lid. On top, Bob Woodward’s State of Denial and Jane Goodall’s Beyond Innocence, both inscribed by the authors, reminding me of how my mom told me with glee about how she had hugged Jane Goodall at a book signing at Goucher College and did I know how many famous chimpanzees had also hugged Jane Goodall and did I know how good of a hugger Jane Goodall was. Underneath the superior hugger, Jane Goodall, is a well-worn copy of Alexandra Stoddard’s Grace Notes (heavily annotated!), reminding me of how, when searching for a copy of a Stoddard book that was out of print, my mother had dialed the number listed on Stoddard’s website and had, to my mother’s shock, been rewarded with Alexandra Stoddard herself answering the phone and helping my mother.
At the bottom of this last rubber bin, I find a package, wrapped in tissue paper, and, true to my mother, tied in a ribbon. This- this must be special. Unraveling the tissue paper releases the smell of glue binding, a hint of my mother’s perfume, and, oddly, the smell of crayon. This last packet, this piece of the inheritance of words is actually mine: a small book I had written as a child that had a sandwich as a main character, a series of essays I wrote in middle school about migrating geese, a journal filled to the edges with poetry, pages and pages of printouts of the blog I kept from college through grad school, my dissertation, every paper I have ever written, my own words coming back to me. My mother placed me in the ranks with any and every other author.
For my mother, the love of books was the love of people: the richness of personality of authors, the characters they created, the tradition they perpetuated. Lifting each book out of the big rubber bin and placing it on the book shelf feels like validating my mother, feels like crafting her a monument worthy of her greatness. I feel like a stone cutter carving an angel who wears her face, reaches out with her hands, flexes wings made of words.
The last book I shelve here, fittingly, is hers, her journal and prayer book, her self-help, in the little section left in the circuit I have made in the room of shelves, the bottom left corner, the eleventh hour of the clockwise path I have marked with the words of the world.
For an audio version of this story, visit my podcast at OstraCandice.
