The Weight of Poetry

For my wife’s 75^th birthday, I decided to say “Yes, dear” when she suggested we re-paint the kitchen and hallway. By “we” I mean the painters we hired. Our “can do” spirit when we first moved in has metamorphosized to “we’d rather pay someone else. “ And so the painters arrived to our hallway stripped of all the photos and artwork on the hallway’s walls and a kitchen with all counters, walls and such cleared, from the spice rack to the toaster oven to the baskets stored atop cabinets. 

 

We didn’t count on them wanting to move out entirely the four bookshelves in the hall, so while they laid down the tarps on the floor, I was frantically figuring out how to un-shelve and re-shelve come 350 books in various nooks and crannies of rooms not to be painted. It turns out that poetry weighs quite a lot! Its job is to lighten our burdens and help the spirit fly a bit freer, but the cumulative weight of all those words on printed pages turns out to be quite a lot, as my upper arm muscles can testify. 

 

When the job is done and it’s time to replace them in their bookshelf homes, I suspect that this is just the right moment to consider, “Do I really need this collection of French poetry from my high school English class?” Likewise, the kids’ old piano books in a bottom drawer of one bookshelf. Just the tip of the iceberg of the “death-cleaning” (the Swedish term for getting rid of things you never look at and really don’t need so your kids won’t have to do it when you’re gone) that lies ahead. I’ve already made a pass at the old videos and DVD’s and cassette tapes and T-shirts from Orff chapters and such, but so much more awaits. Four file cabinets of old notes from just about every Orff workshop I’ve ever taught, some 50 cassette tapes I couldn’t yet bear to part with, but most likely will never listen to again—how can I? Yesterday my wife recycled the stick that had the kids’ heights at different ages and I protested strongly. (Where is that stick, by the way?!)  She did decide to keep the box of letters they had written to Santa and that was a delight to re-read.

 

And so it goes. I’m still creating work that I hope to preserve, mostly in this i-Cloud form, still buying books and CD’s, still tucking away gifts from my trips in this drawer or that. But just as the body begins to shrink and the hearing and sight and libido diminish, so should we reduce the things around us to the essential, the memorable, the useful and yes, a few nostalgically sweet. Hopefully in physical form. As noted in my “4444” post, I would be happy to have a spiral bound paper copy of all these blogposts in the hope that someone somewhere someday may sit down with a cup of tea, soft lighting, nice music playing and read of this marvelous adventure that has been part of my life. But as that last entry testified, that would need to be a 15-volume set! Is it worth the paper?

 

Before closing out, anyone want any poetry collections?