Holiday Labor

Finally – the sun is breaking through the trees outside my office window, a necessary component to this holiday-less weekend. While everyone fires up the grill and pays homage to the last rites of summer I will be here wielding the vacuum cleaner, listing books, and at best, reclining on the couch with Erica Bauermeister’s delicious novel The School of Essential Ingredients. As always on the Labor Day weekend, Eric is back at the Great Lakes (no, it's the Great TRAIL!) Festival selling books from an enormous tent, which of course means that it is absolutely, positively NOT allowed to rain, though sometimes it does anyway despite my vehement demands that it not. The most notable time occurred a few years ago in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, a picturesque town nestled on the banks of the upper Mississippi. By the time a storm of biblical proportions blew out of town a full third of his show inventory wound up on the warehouse floor like a heap of sodden towels. One glance and the insurance adjuster declared it a total loss. But let’s not go there …

Instead I’m focused on accomplishments today, some of which even include house cleaning. Yesterday I listed books, but mostly floated around the house in a state of ecstacy. Our youngest daughter Caitie landed a job in her new home in Maryland as an account exec for a marketing firm. AND the storm that’s headed for Florida chose to wait until our oldest daughter and her family left Disney World. They landed in Detroit late last night, but already she loaded a couple hundred photos onto Snapfish, which meant I began the day in granny heaven. Isn’t my baby CUTE?





I’m hoping sales pick up at the antiques mall this weekend as they did over the Fourth of July, but honestly it’s not looking good. While online sales have spiked – not in quantity, but definitely in dollar value (which is even better) the mall has slipped into a coma. And that’s not even the worst of it. Someone apparently dropped an antiquarian book on the floor from a top shelf, broke the binding and sent pages scattering like leaves in a windstorm. Then they scooped them all up and shoved them into the binding willy-nilly, which of course is a moot point since the poor book died the second it hit the floor, but still. Someone also left on the floor the plastic bag and ticket for a wonderful ephemera item which had fold-out diagrams for building boats. Even before Eric went through all the baskets looking for the missing brochure I knew we’d experienced theft again. Just as before, it tamped my exuberance like tobacco in the bowl of a pipe.

Oh, but wait, that’s not even all. I left the big one for last. The second I turned into my space with a banker’s box full of books I was greeted by a heap, a mound, no, a MOUNTAIN, of books on the floor. We’re talking Mt. Shasta here, all on antiques and collectibles. I knelt down to reshelve them and immediately realized that the shelf had collapsed. Who knows how long they’d lain there?

“Do you think maybe we made it too heavy?” I asked as Eric knelt down beside me

He stuck his head in the bookcase and had a look around. “Nope. Somebody used it as leverage to stand up. Broke the bracket clean off.”

I glanced over at the chair, the ugly, ugly chair I bought in hopes that it would stick around for a while. The good one departed too fast, so I figured go for ugly, price it high, and I’ve got a chair for life to allow people to browse the bottom shelves. But apparently it doesn’t matter whether or not I have a chair. Fortunately, we live right off the main drag where the antiques mall is located, so Eric left me to make order and shelve the new stuff while he went home and got some tools and another bracket. Forty-five minutes later we were back in business.

Though I went home in a state of high dudgeon, none of this diminishes my love for the mall. The fact is, whether it’s online or in a retail setting, sales go up, sales go down. Books sit on the shelves like jewels and books meet sorry fates (I once fell down the stairs and broke the binding of one I’d just sold. And we won’t even get into the mini-flood of a couple years ago). It's also why other people are firing up grills this weekend while Eric sells books in a tent and I  list the pile on the floor next to my desk

Call it a labor of love. Because, in the end, that's eaxctly what it is.