This plain old two-storey house, bought for twenty-five thousand dollars in 1989, has nine rooms, not counting entranceways (including a "mud room," in local parlance*): three bedrooms, two bathrooms, kitchen, utility room/cat box room/pantry (it's more sanitary than it sounds, put that way), dining room, and tiny music room (piano, stereo). There's a little entranceway by the front door with a packed bookshelf. All of these rooms have books in them except the bathrooms, kitchen, and utility room, and indeed the utility room often has one or more books on the dryer, waiting to be taken to "the workshop," where a lot of the books are stored, or perhaps to "the cabin," where there are some books (mostly belonging to the children or kept on account of them). There are several shelves of library-discard bound volumes of The New Yorker in a bookshelf in the garage. There are no books in the unfinished cellar where the water heater and a lot of dust are. There are always some books here and there on the floor.
Doesn't everybody live like this?
*Out here, it seems most people enter and leave their houses by a side door. The front door isn't used very often during the week. When you're out walking in the neighborhood, you'll often notice that people don't shovel the snow to make a path to their front doors; all the traffic is to the side door. It's the side door that opens on the mud room here. That's where you might take off your shoes and hang your coat. There's a small shelf above the coats in the mudroom, and I suppose it usually has a few books on it.
If you google mudroom, you won't see anything that looks like ours. Those mud rooms or mudrooms don't have mud in them and they never did.
When I'm not buying books I'm buying harmonicas (mostly diatonics). If wasn't for space, lack of income, and dytrophy I would be buying guitars.
