Light Refreshments Served

A couple of weeks ago we got together with several of my husband’s siblings to clean out his mother’s house prior to  its pending sale next week. His mother actually died two years ago, but it has taken this long to face the inevitable and just get in there and do it.

Our own house is pretty full of our stuff, so we didn’t lay claim to much. But, along with a couple of nice pieces of furniture, we did end up coming home with several boxes of books. Why did we do this? I ask myself. Particularly considering that we already HAVE way more books than we have places to display them. And a book is not something I can abandon lightly. I love books. I have easy access to books, so I possess a good number of them–more than I’m ever likely to open again in this lifetime, let alone read. And yet giving a book to Deseret Industries is for me almost like sending a child to an orphanage.

Larry felt the same way about these books from his mother’s home. I persuaded him to release his grip on the old Encyclopedia Americanas, but the Children’s Literary Library could not be abandoned. His mother had read those stories to him as a child. He wanted to read them to HIS children. All right, well, his grandchildren, then. And the Physical Science set; there might be something in those six volumes he would want to reference. Never mind the fact that Physical Science itself has probably changed pretty significantly since the publication of those books; never mind the easy accessibility on the Internet of anything he would want to know in the (unlikely) event that he had a sudden science question–he NEEDED those books. So we have them.

This got me thinking. I have a theory that we ALL have something like this in our homes or lives. I have friends, for example, who possess enough fabric to supply an entire small country with quilts. Others have scrapbook supplies, cooking utensils, dishware.

Here’s my question: What is the one thing you have more of than you’re ever going to be able to use? And what is it about that “thing” that compels you to keep amassing it?