OurWrightSide Weblog

Cheryl writes:   “During one of our family’s many trips to see everyone, I received an invitation to spend the night with Clynese’s eldest daughter, Sheila and her husband, Louis.  I was thrilled.  I have always loved Sheila and Louis.  They were (and still are) brilliant in my eyes, never too busy to listen to my early teenage silliness or spend time talking with me.  They always treated me as though I were an adult and I liked that.

So off we went!

We had a lovely time.  Sheila and Louis have always been fascinating, as was their home.   It was a warm, fun place to explore and to my delight I discovered that they shared the same love that I had for books.  They had an entire wall covered with books.  There were books everywhere!  I was in heaven!  I dreamed of having that many books of my own some day.

We shared a great evening, but nighttime  came quickly…

They fixed a place for me on their couch and went off to bed.  The only problem….  I wasn’t sleepy yet.  So I stayed up, looking through more of their wonderful books.  They wouldn’t mind…

I had never seen that many books before, except at the library back home.  There seemed to be a book for every subject you could imagine.  I must have flipped through them all.  As the night ticked away… as I thumbed through book after book, I noticed that they didn’t seem to be arranged in any sort of way.  

I had always arranged my books by size.  Their books weren’t like that.  There were big books next to little books…  They were just all messed up.  This was no good!  It didn’t look “pretty,” I thought.  So, I decided to rectify this problem immediately and surprise them the next morning.

I spent most of the night, working diligently into the early morning hours, arranging each books according to it’s size.  From big to little, from the top shelf to the bottom shelf, and from left to right I stacked each books carefully.  Once done, I stepped back to behold the “magnificent order”  I had created!  It looked beautiful and “so organized!”

I could hardly wait to show them what I had done for them!  I slept hardly a wink in anticipation.

Morning came quickly, and when Sheila and Louis entered the room I proudly pointed to the bookcase to show them what I had done for them.  They were so surprised!  They thought it looked very nice and I was so pleased that they liked it and appreciated all my hard work.

Years later… they told me, with a smile, that they had their books organized “alphabetically.”

Opps!

Well… you gotta love ’em for how they handled it.  They could have really devastated me, but instead, they chose to handle it with love.

And I loved them all the more for it.“