Recently, my boyfriend has taken up the money-making hobby of book selling. He goes to garage sales and buys books for cheap and then resells them online to companies such as Amazon, Powell’s, and Moola4books.com. Sometimes if I have the morning off I’ll go with him to these sales to see if there is anything I want.
Sometimes we go to estate sales, which typically are open houses held by the adult children of a deceased older person. Among their dusty books and boxes of Depends we often find some good deals (not for the Depends, just books). But it made us both horribly aware of our own mortality: what will become of our own books when we die?
The other day my boyfriend answered an ad on Craigslist for ten boxes of free books. When he arrived at the address, he saw that it was a building for mostly older people. The landlord let him into the basement where boxes and boxes of books were sitting in the dust. After he hauled the load home, we went through the boxes.
Inside were mostly books on history, Billy the Kid, and some classical sheet music. Among the books, however, were lost photographs, letters, and even a diary. One letter we found among the books was particularly interesting. Across the front the words “Haliegh, do not open until morning of Gramma’s last flight”
Inside the envelope was a note from said Gramma, thanking the person for dropping her ashes and offering some last-minute life advice. The envelope had been sealed shut when we got it.
These items inspired many conversations about who these people may have been, what happened to them, why was this letter unread? My boyfriend felt angry at first. “Who can’t be bothered to open a letter from your dead grandma?” he said, appalled. I suggested that maybe she wrote the letter and then died, never putting it into the right hands.
Either way, these lost items of our loved ones speak volumes to who they were when alive, and how we treat our elders. Maybe these people who died didn’t have any children, but it’s hard to understand how family members can just give away loads of things, or sell them, without even sorting through them for personal mementos.
After we sorted through the books, selling off some to websites and others to the local used bookstore, we are left with four medium-sized boxes of books that aren’t worth anything (at least not now). We’ll put them into our own apartment’s storage space until we can think of something to do with them.
Bent Shelf Book Reviews 