My mom reading to me (at age 2-3) from “The Real Mother Goose”.

My mom loved to read.

That actually feels like an understatement. She LIVED to read. Our house was full of books - in addition to their dedicated shelves, books lined our staircases, presenting a tripping hazard. She read aloud to me every night as a child, and continued to do so even when I was an adult.

My mom was a collector of all sorts of things - fossils and rocks, jewelry and clothing, and curious oddities like busts of the great composers and small replicas of architectural buildings. She saved her journals from when she was 17 until she was about 65. She saved every letter that anyone ever wrote her and every postcard that anyone ever sent her. Her friends would collect extra blank postcards from their travels and bring them back to her. In this way, she was able to travel the world.

When she passed away, I was immediately overwhelmed with the volume of tasks that accompany closing her estate and having to dismantle her carefully curated life. The house was full of 2,631 books (yes, I counted), and I knew that the collection would probably overwhelm any used bookstore or library donation program. I also knew that they wouldn’t fit in my apartment in Seattle (I have my own impressive collection) and that our taste in reading was so different that I could never truly appreciate them.

A few hours after the particularly emotional task of re-homing her cat Lucy, I had a stroke of inspiration:

What if I distributed her books through Little Free Libraries? And what if I added a blank, self-addressed, and stamped postcard from her collection to each book, along with an invitation to write back to me?

I’m working on the hypothesis that people who appreciate finding great books in Little Free Libraries are also the kind of people who, if asked, will take a few minutes to send a note back explaining why they selected that particular book. My mom’s interests were so wide and varied that I am deeply curious about the person who will select one of her five books about lobsters or one of her many books about adventuring to the North and South Poles.

This is a project born of grief and a desire to honor my mom’s love of books, written correspondence, and an effort to create meaning from the tragic experience of losing my wonderful mom - my greatest champion.