The Universe Wants Me to Have More Bookshelves

by

Nicki Leone

Over the last two weeks, I’ve had my hands on more books, and done less reading, than at any time since I used to fake knowing the material for college courses I didn’t want to have to take. Two weeks ago Tropical Storm Nicole blew her way up the east coast, causing many dire predictions from weather anchors who had otherwise had a relatively boring and disaster-free season, but on the whole failing to live up to their excitedly ominous warnings. Except at my house.

At my house, TS Nicole stalled for a while, and proceeded to dump twenty-two inches of rain on my roof over the course of about five days. That is about as much rain in a week as we would normally get in six months, which made for a soggy yard and a stir-crazy dog frustrated at being kept indoors. But I am a veteran of many a hurricane and beyond taking the usual precautions of closing the deck umbrella and making sure the wicker furniture wouldn’t blow off the porch, I wasn’t too worried. I made endless pots of coffee and drank them, curled up on my couch reading books.

On the afternoon of day five, though, the sky turned very dark, the wind picked up, and the power flickered. What had been steady, heavy rain turned into the kind of downpour that makes it hard to see across the street. And while I stood looking out my back door, wondering if the deck umbrella was okay just closed, or whether I should brave the elements and try to take it down entirely, I heard a crash and a yelp behind me and the dog came scrambling out of the front room, startled and shaking.

The front room. The library.

I’m happy to report that I have at least some of my priorities straight. I made sure the dog was okay before I went to look at what had hurt him in the front room. I thought that perhaps he had knocked over a stack of heavy books (of which there are many). But with a blank, numb sense of despair I discovered that part of the ceiling had come crashing down on top of literary criticism and poetry, bringing with it sticky, sodden drywall, damp and dripping pieces of filthy fiberglass insulation, and a steady stream of water. Tropical Storm Nicole had invited herself inside.

The next couple hours were frantic. A blur of buckets and pans and old shower curtains pressed into service to protect what could be protected in the bookcases. And while there isn’t much time for reflection when you are in crisis mode, I could feel a sense of panic pressing at the back of my skull, when it became quite possible that I might not be able to save my books.

My very lowest moment happened while I was holding onto the very highest rung of the ladder against the side of the house. I clung to it, drenched from the rain, barefoot because I didn’t trust my worn sneakers, trying to hoist a huge tarp onto the roof where the leak seemed to be. And I realized I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t step off that ladder and onto the roof. I was too afraid to let go. I gripped the top rung and was rained on, frustrated and in tears and afraid of falling. “I’m going to slip and break something,” was all that I could think.

I joke sometimes that I’m afraid of heights but I’ve rarely been face to face with it. And I’ve never before been in a position where I had to confront that fear or lose something important to me. I hope if the dog had been up there, I’d have found the courage get up on the damn roof.  But it was clear to me that the whole roof could be in danger of falling in and I still wouldn’t have been able to step off that ladder. Directly underneath the section I was looking at some 4,000 books were at risk of being transformed from sources of wonder and delight into sodden masses of useless pulp. And I still couldn’t step off the ladder.

The crisis, like all crises, passed more quickly than seems possible looking back. What felt like days of trauma was actually only several hours. I called a friend who was not afraid of the precarious heights of a single story ranch house with a gently sloping roof. She scurried up there without a thought and got the tarp over the leak. I called my landlord, (who’s last words to me a week earlier, on his way out of the country for a vacation, were “When I get back I’ll get someone to replace those missing shingles on the roof”), and reported the damage. I called a friend who freelances as a contractor, and set up a time so she could come fix the giant hole in my ceiling. “Yikes,” said my roof-climbing friend, peering into the room, “there might be snakes!” Snakes, I told her, I can deal with.

The following week was spent bagging up trash and sticky insulation, coughing uncontrollably and downing handfuls of Motrin to deal with the almost constant headaches caused from the smell of mold and mildew, and later the fine plaster dust that seemed to get everywhere when the ceiling was patched, or the smell of paint, when the patch was covered. When at last the work was done and the paint was finally drying, I was able to turn my attention to the books.

And really, it could have been worse. Much, much worse. Although everything in the library was coated with a fine grit, the books themselves were all in sturdy maple bookshelves and none of them had actually got wet. An undeserved reward for my cowardice up on the roof.  Now, all that’s left to do is take them out of their cases, shelf by shelf, wipe them down and spread them out—as half my poetry books are at the moment—in the shade of my deck umbrella, to let the warm and dry October wind rifle their pages and dispel the damp. My back deck looks a little bit like the staging area of a terrible book-traffic accident, with patients lying side by side in rows waiting for treatment while I take the worst hurt (or the most beloved) and carefully scrape away any leftover plaster or shreds of insulation. Twenty down, three thousand nine hundred and eighty to go.

And the cases hadn’t been completely full when the ceiling caved in on them, which was a small mercy.  These book cases are five feet tall and over the last couple of months I’d been eyeing the three feet of space between the top of the bookshelves and the ceiling with something approaching resentment. That was wasted potential bookshelf space I kept thinking. I had a notion of running a shelf or two above the cases, and had therefore been clearing off all the books that had been “shelved” in stacks along the tops of the cases, as well as the piles that had grown up along their sides and corners—stacks of books I wanted to keep together but didn’t have a shelf for yet.

I had been moving them across the room and into the hall bit by bit, but procrastinating on doing anything more because I knew that would require taking all the remaining books out of their cases, dusting everything, and cleaning shelves that hadn’t been wiped down since I first moved in five years earlier.  I felt exhausted just contemplating the notion.

Until last week, when I stood under the freshly painted ceiling, writing a check to the woman who had come over and fixed everything for me. I could see the white plaster dust coating everything, taste it when I breathed, and saw the clouds of it billow up when the dog thumped his tail against the carpet. “I’m going to have to take every book out of its case and wipe down every volume and every shelf,” I thought, and turned to look at the contractor. “Do you build bookshelves?” I asked.

Yes, she said. Yes I do.

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.