We are old and we have a lot of stuff.  A week or two ago you could hardly see this desk in our basement–it was buried under piles of books and old computers and things we no longer use.  It took us a week to work to the bottom of the piles and thin things out.  John is on a quest to do that to our entire house.

It’s really hard to part with things we’ve used and loved, especially books.  In the olden days when we traveled, to remember a place, you’d buy a book.  This was long before we had the internet or digital images at our finger tips.  When I was living in South Africa, I poured over the books in local bookstores before deciding which ones to take home to remember a land I loved.  John did the same when he lived in Switzerland.

Here is a stack of beloved books we parted with this week.  I had to take this photo to remember them.

I even parted with my beloved Afrikaans dictionary.  In today’s world, we have every language, every word in our phones with translation apps that even speak to us.  There is no longer a need for dictionaries of any kind.

Here are travel guides, that went with us all around the world.  Now, travel apps are in our phones, just like dictionaries and words.

We donated 4 large boxes of books to a local used bookstore this week.  This is just the beginning.  We are thinning out.  It’s painful, especially parting with books.

I remember when a old friend said, “I no longer have the luxury of reading a book twice.”  It was his way of saying, I just won’t live long enough to read all the books I want to read.  I understand that feeling now.  It’s time to share these beloved books with others.