Old and New...

...and everything in between. This is my desk/bookshelf/curio cabinet/. I put things up there that I enjoy looking at. We were always talking about moving and never doing it, but at one point a friend and master furniture maker made us some office furniture. This particular piece is actually in 14 different sections, some with shelves or drawers built in. The idea was that the different pieces could be reconfigured to fit any space we might move to. There is another 3 piece worktop that originally held the bookshelves. When we moved here it was very easy to unscrew the different boxes and disassemble the whole thing. What wasn't so easy was deciding what to do with all the things that had collected on it over the years and most of them got tossed.

When we finally did move, we decided to share one big room as an office. John got one of the worktops and I got the other one . We tried many different configurations of this part with all its different boxes, but in the end we kept it in its original step tansu-like form. We even added some new IKEA pieces, a craft table for me, a corner unit next to John's desk, and another tall narrow bookshelf.

It all looked a bit like a train station with furniture lined up around the walls, interspersed with mostly empty bookshelves.

It doesn't take long, however, to fill empty spaces. A vacuum is an empty space devoid of matter. Although that definition of a vacuum comes from  physics and usually applies to cosmic voids, I think it can work equally well when applied to my bookshelves. Another phrase, this one attributed to Aristotle is  nature abhors a vacuum. In the ten years we have lived here I have filled the shelves with all manner of things, old photographs, gifts, things I have picked up during outdoor walks over the years, paintbrushes and even books and journals. 

I think of my bookcases not as a physics lesson or a philosopher's musing but more as an archaeological record. One which will need to be fastened more securely to the wall as there was another earthquake near Eureka yesterday....