Well, our kids are officially launched—we brought Twin A to RISD on Sunday and Twin B to Wesleyan yesterday. Bittersweet, exciting, sad, blah blah blah. The universe does not need another post about this rite of passage, so I’ll spare you. And I’ve already written (at length) about the fact that I’m less than thrilled by this whole empty-nest situation.

BUT I will say, in the spirit of looking on the upside: I have started seeing this phase as an exciting opportunity to de-clutter. Maybe this is a common instinct? The birds fly, then you look around and think: Jesus, there is way too much stuff in this nest. Clothes I haven’t worn in years, medications from the Bush era, the kids’ old Halloween costumes moldering in boxes in the basement, books I will never, ever read.

You see, I am a bit of a keeper. I’m a hopeless nostalgic and perennial hoper of things like: maybe someday I really will go back to playing the recorder. (I played in church, right up through high school, and was quite good. I still dream of finding someone to play the recorder duet solo in “Stairway to Heaven” with me.) And: Maybe someday when I try on that one particular top I’ve had for going on ten years I won’t think “yeah…no” and wear something else instead. And: Maybe one day I’ll have a grandkid who will be delighted by this mildewed Minnie Mouse costume from 2013.

And then there is the other force that is perpetually enabling my keeping tendencies: My parents’ crap.

As we all know, one of the super fun parts of adulting is being offered your parents’ (and sometimes your own) crap when they downsize and/or declutter out of consideration for those who will have to clean up after them when they depart this realm.

This is particularly fun if your parents are, like you, enthusiastic acquirers and keepers of things. My parents’ accumulation bent was was aided and abetted by the fact that they’ve always had lots of space. They used to own a ramshackle old farm in Maine in addition to our primary residence in Connecticut, and, later, owned and ran a whole kids’ summer camp, plus a small vacation rental property. That’s a lot of rooms to fill with crap.

My late father was particularly adept at accumulating things. This included everything from random brackets and hardware and slightly broken furniture found at barn sales or “free” piles on the side of the road that he thought might one day come in handy (Occasionally they did), to toys, sporting equipment, and VHS tapes at the town dump’s “swap shop” (Merry Christmas!), to old books—lots and lots of old books. More on those in a bit.

A tiny fraction of his collection

My mother, meanwhile, is a genealogy enthusiast and unofficial keeper of family heirlooms—aka the crap of previous generations. She is loath to let this stuff go out of family, which is why, for years, my brother and I have periodically gotten texts or emails from her, accompanied by pictures, saying things like: Do you want one or more of these neat old horseshoes? They’re from from Gram Gram’s farm in Ireland. Or: Do either of you want this afghan? It’s one your great grandma Eulalie made when she was at a sanitorium “drying out.” Or: Any interest in this lamp? I think Dad picked it up off the side of the road.

And then there’s my own crap that has been offered back to me over the years: Christmas ornaments I made in nursery school, the framed Annie and Peter Pan Broadway posters that hung in my childhood bedroom, my baby teeth.

Eight times out of ten, I say no thank you. (See: Baby teeth.) But, well, that’s still a lot of crap making its way into my life.

Some of it I actually have a use for, like my grandmother’s china and silver and my great, great aunt So-and-So’s crystal glassware. The fact that these things come from family is a substantial part of their beauty to me, and of the pleasure I take in using them exactly twice a year.

That’s Grandma’s damask tablecloth, too.

But sometimes I say yes to the crap I’m offered simply because I don’t like the thought of it being consigned to oblivion. If it’s interesting or unique or has sentimental value or even just screams “history!” (e.g. an ashtray from the Red Cross Club in Naples where my other grandmother worked during the war) it’s hard for me to say no.

Which brings me to my father’s books.

My dad was a major bibliophile, and fancied himself a bit of a collector. (He fancied himself a lot of things, only some of which he actually was, but that’s a topic for another day.) Over the years, he collected dozens of old books from yard sales, antique shops, used bookstores, and, of course, the glorious Traveler Restaurant in Union, Connecticut, where every customer gets to pick out a book from the vast and eclectic collection after they finish their club sandwiches and cole slaw.

If you’ve ever traveled between Massachusetts and Connecticut on I-84, you’ve seen this sign.

Recently, my mother asked me if I wanted to go through my dad’s book collection and see if there was anything I wanted to keep or try to sell. Obviously I said yes, because I am me.

There were three moving boxes full of books, most from the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth century, ranging from McGuffey’s Fourth Eclectic Reader (1879) to Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge (1944, multiple copies—it was one of my dad’s favorite books—including a first edition) to his 1953 Wolf Scouts guide.

Most of the books are in decent condition, and many of them are quite beautiful.

You’d think at least some of them would be valuable. But even the ones that seemed most promising—a mint-condition, late 19th century copy of The Song of Hiawatha, for example—really aren’t worth much, according to my cursory internet research. Thirty, forty dollars tops. The first edition Razor’s Edge is the only one that might be able to fetch a few hundred bucks.

Still: there was never any question that I would keep them. Some of them, anyway. So I sorted through and picked out the ones that called to me—the most beautiful, the most intriguing, and/or the coolest in a kitschy sort of way—like this delightfully pulpy novella (also by Somerset Maugham):

I really hope she falls on her knees. Bet he does too!

Will I ever actually read any of them? On some lonely, rainy, empty nest Saturday afternoon will you find me on the window bench with the cat in my lap and a cup of coffee on the windowsill, reading The Story of San Michele or Arabian Nights? (Or, more likely, The Beachcomber?)

Or will they just sit on the shelves for a few decades, only for me to eventually foist them upon my own children—or perhaps my theoretical mildewy Minnie Mouse grandchild?

I don’t know. But I’ve decided to stop wondering what the point is of keeping them. I just like knowing that they exist, and that they are part of my world. Turning the pages, smelling the old book smell, scanning the text—the cadence and phrasing so different from modern day, yet still completely immediate and human…it’s satisfying and sad and a little bit magical. Maybe the Germans have a word for it. Altenbücherntraurigkeitmagiefreude?

More than any other sort of artifact (e.g. pill-popping Eulalie’s afghans), old books feel to me like portals to the past, and to the lives of actual, individual people: the authors and illustrators and designers who created them, the agents and editors and printers who brought them into the world, the readers who scrawled their names on the inside covers. All of them wearing fun, old-timey clothing, and saying things like “Say, now, that’s one swell book.” And probably also having very bad teeth.

It wasn’t easy, culling the collection. But I managed, and now I’m left with two moving boxes of rejected (but very cool) books. Do I bring them to a rare / old book buyer? Offer them up for free on Facebook Marketplace? Honestly, I feel more inclined to give them a proper and dignified burial in the back yard: Here lie the remains of countless hours of human imagination, creativity, toil, pleasure and pain. Ashes to ashes, pulp to pulp.

Or maybe you want them? I’m quite serious. If you’re local to the Boston area, or feel like taking a road trip, they are yours for the taking: worthless and priceless, like so much that is good in this world.

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