Notes from a nursing home: ‘Our books told of who we were. The story of us. Then the movers came and asked what should go’
Pencil marks in the margins of books gathered over a lifetime was proof of a life lived. So when it came time for Andrew McKean
Pencil marks in the margins of books gathered over a lifetime was proof of a life lived. So when it came time for Andrew McKean to move into aged care, leaving his books behind made the self thinner My wife, Patricia, and I came to our nursing home with little more than clothes, a few photographs and some books we could still carry.
The shelves we left behind still stand in the emptied rooms of the house we called home for 30 years. Those shelves once groaned under the weight of books we had gathered, page by page, year by year. Our books told of who we were, or who we thought we might become.
There were the novels Patricia read in the long evenings after the children slept, their spines cracked from her hands. There were the histories I brought home from the library sales, dusty volumes of wars and voyages that filled the quiet hours when rain beat on the roof. Poetry too, slim books with thin paper, marked where a line struck true.
We kept them not only for the stories printed inside but for the story they made of us. Continue reading...
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