I have a “situation.” 

It’s not serious enough to be classified as a problem. 

And, it’s really not a terrible situation to be in. 

I am running out of shelf space. 

This year, I have bought more books than I usually do. Because of the #22in22 initiative (if you’re not familiar with the initiative, you can click here to read an earlier blog post about it), I find myself not just visiting more bookstores, but shopping in these bookstores. Which means, I have a stack full of books that I have yet to read. And, I am running out of space for all these books.

I decided to spend some time trying to re-arrange my shelves. Was there another way, a more efficient way, to stack my books? Generally, I try to keep one author’s novels grouped together. For nonfiction, I try to group them by subject when possible. 

On a bottom shelf I found a few books that I haven’t looked at in a long time. These were books I read quite a long time ago. Before adulthood. Before I moved out of my parents’ house when I was twenty-two. These are books that moved with me when my then-fiancé, now-husband moved in together. And when we moved from our one bedroom apartment to our current three-bedroom townhome, these books moved with me. But even more than that, these books were moved and unpacked and put on my bookcase. 

Now the time has come to move these books to another location. They will be moved into a large plastic box I have in my closet, a box that has a few pieces of jewelry that were important to me when I was younger, a doll that had two names (Lovey and Jill), and a little scooper I made in my junior high school metal shop class. 

I’m not ready to donate these books. But I am ready to claim their shelf space.

Readers, I’m curious. Do you have any books from your childhood that you’ve held on to? Please share!!