Season of Farewells

Let me just start with a confession:

I have too many books. 

There, I've said it! They are well organized in our bookshelves according to author and subject. Most of them have been read and many are marked up. I always read with pencil in hand. 

For me there can never be too many books, but there will come a time when they will be a burden to someone else unless I take care of them. Also, the bookshelves are getting too full.

It is time to do something about it.

We gave away many books when we moved here from Kitchener in 2008, and now we must do it again. The last few weeks we have been sorting, boxing, and emailing to try to find new homes for our treasures. There is room in the bookshelves again; hopefully we can keep it that way!

As I cleared out my shelves, I recalled the time when I was a student at the University of Waterloo. One of the retired professors, who still had an office in the department he had chaired for many years, had passed away. Within a day everything in his office was gone. I remember the shock I felt at how quickly a life passes into oblivion.

We spring up like wildflowers in the desert and then wilt,

transient as the shadow of a cloud.  [Job 14.2]

Just recently the world lost someone special who entertained many with his gentle humor and wit --Stuart McLean, the storyteller on CBC's Vinyl Cafe. I remember so well how our family used to listen to him on our way home from church. One morning, as we got into the car, Hardy couldn't locate his glasses. One of the children actually saw them lying in the snow a few feet away. He had put them on the hood of the car and they had slid off as we began driving away. He had lost several things that way and we all thought that, with a bit of embellishment, this would have been a good Stuart McLean story! Stuart's memory lives on in the stories he told.

Another tug at my heartstrings is the imminent closing of the seventy-year-old Mitchell Fabrics on Main St. in Winnipeg. My mother was a seamstress and that is where she went to get her supplies. Etched in my memory is the day she and I went in there to purchase the material for my wedding dress as well as for the dresses of my attendants. She was going to sew them all. We chose a dark blue velvet for the bridesmaids' dresses and some beautiful white silk with flowered appliqués for my wedding gown. I was the first one in our family to get married, and we were all new at this. 

                                                                                                                     

Two of my sisters in their blue velvet gowns

Today, every time Hardy and I drive by Mitchells, we remember our youth and our young love, and we look at each other in wonder: 

Has it really been that long? Where have all those years gone?

Forty-nine years ago we made a promise to each other

Hardy and I have just returned from a trip to Ontario to visit with our middle daughter and her family during spring break. We had a rollicking good time with our four grandchildren, ages 7-14. On our last morning, when it was time for them to go back to school on the bus, they begged us to stay longer. They clung to us. "We will see each other again in spring," we told them. "Just stay until spring, don't go," they cried. "But we must go, and you must stay," we told them. 

We wonder what their lives will be like, and how much of what they experience we will experience with them.

                 

I have decided not to be too sad or melancholy about the disappearance of things dear to my heart. Instead, with Winnie the Pooh, I say:

"How lucky I am to have something [or someone] that makes saying goodbye so hard."