A Love Letter to Libraries

Thank God for libraries.  I know it’s not exactly a surprise that libraries are amazing, but I just wanted to remind people.  Thank God we have libraries.  We have government funded institutions where the public can get knowledge for free.  Free.  Thank God we have places where you can learn about anything you want to from birding in Maine to the history of cryptography to the Armenian language.  Amazing.  Thank God.

I grew up in a Boston suburb unaware of what a privilege it was to have access to all of the books I wanted.  When I went to get my very own library card at the age of ten I was so excited to scribble my messy signature on my very own library card.  Never mind that I lost maybe five or six cards before learning how to keep a wallet.  As a child, I pull God knows how many books off the shelves and took a stack home every time my mom and I went. With the progression of the years I found myself moving from section to section of the library.  There was a whole floor for children, a section for teens and of course floors and floors of books for adults.

The library is of course an accumulation of other resources, both physical and digital.  My family didn’t have a computer that was connected to the internet until I was in middle school.  So, I walked the three blocks from my house to the library just to type an essay on the computer (or more likely to play all of the games on the Disney channel website.)  It’s also pretty nice when you want to get your fix of trashy Cosmo magazines but don’t want to spend actual money on purchasing the magazine.

Now, the library in my town is one room, and I can still appreciate what small town libraries do with their size.  Through a network of libraries, I can still get whatever book I want, I just have to be patient for it to travel between towns.  It’s a little bit of a bummer going from floors to one room, but still I always find what I’m looking for.  The benefit of having everything next to each other is that I can zip from the fiction to non-fiction and come back with a variety of books.  This past visit I meant to pick up one book and came away with Cinder by Marissa Meyer to The World Without US by Alan Weisman to I Feel Bad About my Neck; and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron.  Moving comes with a lot of changes, but it’s nice to know that wherever I move there will be libraries.