I was once again rearranging bookshelves the other day.  I have not done it for a long time.  I like my shelves to be perfectly organized so I know where each book lives.  But I do not have nearly enough bookshelves for all my books, and I have small children who rearrange my books often, browsing through the adult non-fiction and biographies in search of books to take to bed at night.  Then also, two years ago my husband let my brother remove all the books from two of my large bookcases in order to shore up the beams in the basement in that corner, and the books were returned hopelessly jumbled.  I have not had the time or heart to reorganize all twelve shelves plus the micscellany on the tops of the bookcases, so the books have been confused ever since.

In this area of my life I have to have things perfect or I can hardly face them.  Not so in the rest of the house. My kitchen cabinets are always in disarray.  Either my organisation scheme is completely unintelligible to my family, or they just don't care, but every time someone unloads the dishwasher the pans, casseroles, mixer parts, and infrequently used appliances get put somewhere different.  I never know where to look for anything  besides silverware in my own kitchen.  And it doesn't bother me that much.  My pantry is untidy, and God forbid if I ever need a flashlight or extension cord.  I may be looking for hours or until I forget what I wanted it for.

  But it bothers me to no end to know that my bookshelves are in disarray.  I have not had the time to overhaul every bookcase for years - really, not since we moved back from Malaysia five years ago when the books, once carefully packed into storage boxes, were unsorted back onto the shelves.  Most of the time I actually avert my eyes from the worst shelves when I am working in the "schoolroom", as I am now.  I try not to think about all the books still in boxes in the attic and the storage unit, the boxes in the back of the one closet in our house.  It is too overwhelming. It would keep me awake at night.

But this week I am trying to clear off a few shelves in my daughters' bedroom, the shelves that house the works of various playwrights and the individual copies of Shakespeare and the particularly special old children's books. The girls need more room for their little girl stuff.  In the process of looking for new book-homes I found myself rummaging around in the glass front bookcase that holds my father's collection of Winston Churchill books.  The large, coffee table format books have one special shelf, and there I came across two baby books.  They were sparsely written in, as all but the first child's are. I think I stopped buying baby books altogether after the fourth child.  But this week I sat on the wood floor and thumbed through the book with the Mary Cassatt painting on the front cover that I bought when my first son was born.  There was more writing on the first few pages than later on, except for the Baby's First Christmas page. Near the beginning between the Family Tree page and the My First Teeth I had made some notes about his hospitalization for jaundice at 5 days old.  Although we had tried to avoid a hospital stay by laying him in front of a sunny window in a cardboard box that was supposed to work kind of like an easy bake oven, the weather was cloudy that week and he never turned from yellow to pink.  I remember that part.

What  I did not remember was that when we took him to the hospital the nurses exclaimed over how strong he was, - "He looks more like five weeks than five days," one reportedly said.  And another commented on the way he recognized my voice among all the others. Reading these funny snippets of long-forgotten conversations about a baby who has grown to be an accomplished adult still awakened in me that secret mother's pride.  Although I feel a bit foolish admitting it, something inside me swelled a bit when I read the long-forgotten compliment.  What did it mean even at the time?  That I had done something wonderful by giving birth to such a strapping baby boy? That he had somehow surpassed his nursery mates by virtue of - of what?  Why should anyone feel anything resembling pride about this supposed feat of strength and maturity in a newborn infant?  But like Mary, we keep all these things and ponder them in our hearts, over and over again.