If you love something, set it free...

I am starting my resolutions for 2017 a touch early.

I am purging my books.

This is possibly one of the most difficult tasks I have ever taken upon myself.

I have literally thousands of books. I never, ever get rid of a book. I even have a hard time loaning a book for fear that I won't ever see it again.

And yet, here I am, surrounded by my mounds of books-that I love, mind you-and realizing that the time has come to let them go.

Some of this is fun. Some of it is life affirming. Sending a book off with someone that I know will read it and get some joy out of it is kind of like being a matchmaker. Some of my newer, nicer books are finding homes that way.

But, I am a book hoarder. This is something that I ordinarily say proudly, as though it in any way is different from any other hoarding problem. My grandmother, who died 10 years ago, saved everything. She lived through the Depression and so the idea of throwing away a milk bottle cap or a bread bag was just anathema. She lived in mounds and mounds of stuff just because she could not bear to waste anything.

This past year of my life has been a shedding of my soul. Living through my divorce, I have come to realize (with the help of a lot of therapy) was a trauma. Is a trauma. That I am still dealing with. It took me a while to realize that if I rearranged the furniture, it made life easier. Just because it made the path we walk through different-and somehow this helped us to be able to begin to move forward.

I don't understand a lot of the things that I have done that have helped me to move on, but I do know that they have worked. Changing the bedspread helped. Rearranging the cupboards helped. Purging the closets of clothes and toys and just things has helped.

And so, I have come to the books. At first, I couldn't believe that I was actually considering purging the books. I love them. I love having them around even if I have no intention of ever reading them again. My college books state out loud that I took cool sociology classes. I have read classics-surely every home needs the classics on the shelf, even if they will never be pulled down and opened again? And my children-they need to know that books are treasured and loved by their crazy mom, so having books at every turn surely signifies that?

Well, it turns out, no. My children know I love books. They value books. But if they desperately need to read a book about the impeachment process or how potatoes are grown or the history of Canada, they are going to have to go to the library like I did, or, as is quite more likely, just Google it. We have become a storehouse for books, so much so that we don't even know what all we have, and that isn't doing anyone any good.

And so, I am purging. It is a long and arduous process. It will take a long time, even just to physically move them out of all of the nooks and crannies and figure out where exactly I can take them that they will do anyone else any good.

I'm not getting rid of every book, by a long shot. But if a book has served its purpose in our home, it is time to move along and let it go.

That's what 2017 is to me, letting go. I can't begin to express how much it hurts my heart to hold something that I loved and say goodbye. But it's time. It's time.