The book takes a walk

8/7/09 Walking Home: A Woman's Pilgrimage on the Appalachian Trail (book), given away

Books are emotionally difficult to get rid of. It just seems wrong to pull a book off my bookcase and decide it's no longer worthy of staying in my house. For cryin' out loud, I wrote a book (check it out here or here). That took time, effort, and more than a little chutzpah. I'd be ticked if someone pulled it off their shelf and decided it had to be disposed of. Of course, since I've only sold about a dozen copies and most of them went to my father-in-law, I don't have much to worry about.

Regardless, in the past six months, I've downsized a lot of my books. Many were donated to the Casco Public Library and the rest sold in a yard sale earlier this summer. (Oh, if I'd only known I was going to do this challenge, I could have saved them, and then counted them as downsized one day at a time. It would have gotten me through at least 200 days!) Subsequently, the books I've still got are, more or less, near and dear to my heart.

As a proud Appalachian Trail thru-hiker (feel free to check out the website my great friend Vance made to document my hike), I have a number of great books about the trail. I hate the idea of losing any of them, since I feel so intimately tied to the subject. Indeed, I have my own little A.T. library, with all my hiking books neatly arranged on one bookshelf.

Earlier today, I mailed one away as a gift.

Earlier this week I received a letter from one of my colleagues letting me know that she was moving out of state and wouldn't be returning to our school. It's a big loss for us, but I wanted to wish Christina well and make some sort of farewell gesture. She was an avid outdoor enthusiast and had talked of possibly hiking the Appalachian Trail someday.

I had bought the book in a used book store/organic vegetable market (shouldn't there be one of those in every town?) on the island of Vieques. The A.T. is apparently a hot topic in the Caribbean. It was an interesting read, and I think Christina will appreciate it.

Come to think of it, I didn't really get rid of the book, I just sent it along to its next reader. I can live with that.