Over the past few years I had been slowly editing my belongings, simplifying my schedule and de-cluttering my mind. My beloved things and household possessions and clothing are narrowed down to only the things I love and that are useful and necessary. My home isn't bare. It contains baskets, color, flowers, music and fun dishes to serve the food we prepare. I have sentimental items from my children, husband and friends. I still had plenty of stuff. Especially books. My bookshelves were filled.
My elder friends had a ritual they followed when they were nearing end of life. They invited dear friends to browse their bookshelves and to take a few books. I had planned to do the same if I was lucky enough to know ahead of time before my death day arrived.
The books in my home showed a trail of my life. I had books filled with my own writings, the writings of friends and other author’s work collected. Memories of afternoons in used bookstores. Portions of my life spent at Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver. City Lights and Green Apple Books in San Francisco. Powell’s in Portland. Chaucers and Earthlings in Santa Barbara. Bookshop Santa Cruz. Words offered in countless readings. The weekly bookstore date ritual my son and I had while he was growing up.
Books purchased in airports during long flight delays. The year I threw myself a birthday party and asked my friends to bring me a used book they had loved.
Each time I cleaned and organized and make piles of things to release from my life, my books remained untouched.
And then everything changed. A friend loaned me a copy of The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. A tidy little book and a fast read. My mind wanted to dance through the pages, confident I had already freed myself from a lifetime of clutter.
But days later I was still thinking about what author Margareta Magnusson wrote on page 30. “I should have done the job when I was stronger and my health was better.”
And page 32. “What are you going to do with all of your things when you do not have the strength to take care of them?”
I walked through my house taking stock of all of the heavy things I planned to give away someday, before I moved to a smaller house, before my back grew weak.
It came down to one thing. My back was strong enough in the moment, and my hardcover books were heavy.
I made phone calls and I made lists and I boxed up a goodly number of my books and carted them off to my favorite used book charity sale. I kept only the books I still had not read or books that I kept returning to, year after year.
For me the characters in my favorite books are my friends. Relationships I think about long after I finish reading the book. My most loved books left me feeling the author had invited me over for a long chat at her kitchen table. I favored memoirs so intimate I felt myself leaning over the shoulder of the writer, feeling her thoughts and catching glimpses into her life.
But I no longer needed to keep all of the books I’ve loved because the memory of the way those stories made me feel had carved into my heart.
We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty.
With tender honesty, Trevor explores how every ending is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something.
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“Terra Trevor’s memoir is a gentle invitation to journey with her across decades, an invitation to notice with her as she seeks healing and finds belonging. There were phrases and sentences I underlined, places where I wept, passages that will remain with me as they drew me to insights I’d previously struggled to name. I closed the final pages and knew that in reading this book, I had been the recipient of a generous and much-needed gift. While I can certainly finish a book in a day, I chose to move slowly through this one, letting each idea, each paragraph, each reflection gently spill over me, allowing the pages to alter me in some way.” —Patrice Gopo, author of Autumn Song: Essays on Absence
