In the Library at Blackrock

We have a room in our house that is called--somewhat grandiosely and inaccurately--the library. It is not, as the name would have you imagine, a large room filled with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on many levels, with one of those movable ladders to reach the upper shelves and big leather chairs and a fireplace that's always burning and Oriental rugs and . . . well, and all that.

I've always wanted a library like that. But it's probably a good thing I don't have one, because I also don't have any servants. And with no servants, who is it who has to remove every damn book from the shelves, dust them all individually, and then scrub the shelves?

Yup. That would be me.

So it's a good thing our library is just this*:

Seriously, where are my servants? What a mess.

The top shelves are all very old books that have been here since the world began. Or at least since the turn of the 20th century. I know we have some rare and valuable books in there, probably more than I know about, actually, and they should really be taken care of more. Or, uh, at all. They're never actually read, which means they just sit there collecting dust and making it really difficult to clean the shelves.

The bottom shelves hold the children's books, so at least those shelves have been cleaned recently. The top shelves, though? Never cleaned since I've lived here. And that's over seven years now.

Yeah.

So I steeled myself for an alarming amount of dirt and dove in.

First I removed the books from the top shelf and dusted them all individually with a damp rag, putting them on the dining room table as I finished. 

You can maybe imagine the layer of dust on the top edge. Or maybe you can't. Gross.

This part was accomplished while Charlie ran around downstairs pulling the phone off the hook, climbing up on the kitchen table, chasing the cat . . . you know, the usual.

Then, when he went down for a nap, I hauled in the ladder.

It is possible I could have reached the top of the shelving without using the ladder, but I wouldn't have been able to see what I was doing. And I really, really did not want to reach up there blindly. For all I knew, there would be a mummified mouse or something up there. We have a history of unexpected rodent carcasses, you may remember.

So, the ladder. There was a layer of dust on the top part about a quarter inch deep. I scrubbed and wiped and scrubbed and wiped some more on all the surfaces of the top shelf until it was as clean as I could make it. 

Only five more shelves and about two hundred more books to go! Yay.

* This is but a small fraction of books in our entirely-too-literate household, which is why it's kind of dumb to call this the library, as if all the books we possess are in this one room.