The House and Books

By now it had become clear to me that while I had hoped not to list their house until they had been at the Garden a year that I could no longer stick to that plan. My mom was too high up the care levels to be at home and my father's deteriorating mental health would have meant staying at home would have been nearly impossible. Once he told me he couldn't remember their home I knew that bringing him back to sort objects would not be successful. It had the likelihood of upsetting him. 

I had also noticed that he was reading books he found at my mom's facility. One day in the car, I asked about the book he was reading. I did so because the cover made me thing it was a Harlequin romance.  He told me it was an interesting plot line about a man trying to save his family ranch. A woman had come to help him. They weren't getting along, but she seemed like a nice woman. I asked him if it was a romance. He didn't think, but turned it over and sure enough, Harlequin. 

This made me relatively sure that I could begin to sort books. I myself have a lot of books and know just how difficult they can be in a moving process. I was relatively familiar with the used book market in my town. My first thought was to donate them to a local library that Dad had suggest early in the summer. But the work of boxing them up and then the huge number and the stairs up to the building and then down to the basement where their donations went seemed daunting. 

Because I know books and the local book market I knew the rules at our local used book store. They had limits on how many books you could bring in to sell. So I couldn't bring all the books to them at once either. I considered seeing if someone would come to look at his books. That seemed a bit difficult given no one local offered a service to come and take all of the books. 

What I landed on was a process where I bagged instead of boxed the books. I could generally carry four plastic grocery bags of books. I would bag them up and put them in my back seat. Later in the week when I had an errand near the used bookstore, I'd spend an hour looking at books or even reading quietly while Dad's books were processed. I found a nice cycle where I could show up at the store when they opened on a weekday and be out quickly. 

I made this an easier task by taking the books that I knew the store was mostly likely to take first. Sure enough the first few trips I only had one or two rejected books. This was astounding to me. In the past I was happy if they took  half of my books, two thirds was a coup.

At some point I had to clear one of Dad's AV shelves filled with CDs and DVDs. I knew the VHS tapes were absolutely not taken so I tossed those. What I found on that trip was that my "store credit" quadrupled for the DVDs. So I prioritized those. It helped that they were lighter. 

Late in this process my youngest was home on break and helped me carry in the maximum amount of books. This was the last load  of books and I did have more rejects. The kid got paid in being able to shop their used video games.