We are in the middle of a long anticipated home project of replacing the old carpet in the upper level of our raised ranch with wood flooring. All but one room has flooring in it as I write and if everything goes as we hope it will done the day you are reading this.

We have lived in our house over 33 years. While we cleared the kitchen a few years ago for a remodel, this is the first time for all the other rooms upstairs. It meant emptying all that was in cupboards and especially on bookshelves.

I ended up hauling 75 boxes of books downstairs. My Library of America collection and some of my mother’s old books. Gardening books, art books, and decorating books, and other miscellaneous fiction including my wife’s Murder She Wrote collection of books. Did I mention that it came to 75 box loads that we more or less stacked under an eight foot long table in our family room.

We won’t be hauling them all back upstairs–we have a huge pile to take to Half Price Books. It has made me look at the books on the lower level of our house, mostly mine, with new eyes. One of our next projects is to re-paint and carpet the lower level of our home (after replenishing some savings from this project). We had less than a month to get ready for this project. I have a year, most likely for the next.

One way or another, it will mean moving a lot of books. To my mind, this must be the year of saying good bye to many old friends. I don’t want to move all this stuff around only for my son to have to deal with it in another decade or so, depending on how long the Lord grants us health.

Retirement is on the not-too-distant horizon and I’m realizing that many of the books on work-related topics are becoming much less relevant to my life. At this stage, I probably could write a number of those books.

We have books in a storage closet I will probably never read. They are already boxed up, so these need to go.

I also think of books squirreled away behind other books. I couldn’t even tell you what they are, It suggests that they probably won’t be missed.

There are books I thoroughly enjoyed twenty or so years ago. Some I might think of re-reading, but most probably not. It sounds like they need to go.

It’s not only a lesson in facing how challenging physically this gets when one is approaching his eighth decade. It is really about facing aging and the stages of de-accumulating ahead until that final day when it all gets left behind. It’s about mortality, and that great struggle of readers summarized in our favorite mantra: “So many books; so little time.”

One thing is clear. Hauling all those boxes of books down and then back up stairs is not something I’m eager to do at once. If I am to avoid this Sisyphean task a year from now, I need to begin, once we get rid of the current stack. It occurs to me that if I worked at getting rid of a box a week, the job a year from now might be much more manageable.

There is also another compensation–remembering a life of reading–the conversations, the times shared, or the moments of delight or insight. It’s part of what we do more and more as we age–to remember our lives, to take stock, to celebrate the good. For readers, our books are a big part of that.

Now comes the task of figuring out what to keep…. I’ll save that for another blog.