Scrap the Books

I could scrapbook again, I thought, as I wondered what hobby to pick up. A sudden tear sprang to my eyes as I realized it would be a futile effort in the end, anyway. I'd had scrapbooks. Sure, they weren't as pretty as Shiloh's with stickers that matched the background of each page. She was carefully scrapbooking her life, placing every moment into static glossy photos framing memories so she wouldn't forget. Some painful, others beautiful, milestones, adventures. My sister gave me a scrapbook of my wedding. She was a novice to scrapbooking but she had created the most beautiful capture of time surrounded by curated borders and stickers that matched each photo perfectly. 

I'd simply glued things onto a page. Twin pennies Zach picked up from the sidewalk and handed me one summer afternoon. The back pocket of my favourite salmon leggings after they were threadbare. The insert of an Anne Frank DVD. A stick of gum inside a note Katie put on the appreciation board. My I-98 when I entered the US so uncertainly more than 25 years ago. It looked like a hodgepodge of stuff at the bottom of a junk drawer that just needed to be cleared out and probably thrown out but every piece was a snapshot of an ocean of memories. Except I couldn't drag them around the world, so I'd taken a picture of each page, torn them up, and thrown them away. 

And then there were the books. 

Growing up as a missionary kid in Burkina Faso, Egypt, Lebanon, my parents gave me and my sister books as gifts. They would buy them when we went on our vacation to see family every two years, hide them in the suitcases underneath layers of clothes so our curious little eyes wouldn't see them, and give them to us at birthdays and Christmases. I would carefully save up my weekly pocket money until I had enough to go to the dusty toy shop at the end of the street in Heliopolis where I'd discovered a treasure trove of St. Claire's and Mallory Towers series in English. Every time I had enough, I would hurry down to choose another volume, worried they would sell out before I could complete the set. One summer we went to a church conference in Utrecht and my mom paid me to babysit my little brother. I bought him a wooden stick and rudder airplane at one of the booths and spent the rest of my money on books at the ABC. 

The five pounds my dad would hand me at car boot sales in Bexleyheath went first to books. I would search for the 25p bins and bargain for as many paperbacks as I could fit into a plastic bag. Library giveaways in Beirut, a bookstore in California with a punch card where if you bought ten books you got one for free, expensive airport impulse buys in Boston when I had a decent salary, 20TL children's books in Istanbul. Everywhere I traveled around the world, books drew me to them like magnets, their pages holding an adventure I hadn't yet been on. 

But for the past ten years, I'd been culling my collection. I'd lugged boxes of them to the mailroom. Books I hadn't read in years. Books I'd only read a paragraph or chapter in. Books I'd gotten for free. Books I'd bought at a fraction of the cost at the Family Christian bookstore before it closed down. I gave away the rest of my books to my mother. I couldn't afford, on a missionary's salary, to store or ship them from continent to continent. I would keep my top 50 or so. 

For me, books were more than a repository of knowledge. They felt like home. And maybe that was why it felt like I was losing pieces of myself.