Liz lived close to the center of our town, and we rode our
bikes all over together – to the store that sold penny candy, to meet up with
other friends, and, as the photo evidence shows, to the Westborough Public Library.
I still remember this library of my childhood hometown. There were bright, wide
steps just within the side entrance – modern stairs of linoleum leading down to
the children’s section, others up to the main floor, which back then was a
couple decades shy of its centennial.
When I picture the inside of that library, the memory
includes that comforting, musty aroma of old books and polished wood common to
libraries everywhere. A sense of calm, intermingled with expansive curiosity,
settled over me each time I arrived at this place full of books. It’s a
sensation I still get when I pass through the heavy doors of a library and
breath in that bookish scent: what stories will I discover today, what exotic
places, what new information?
Thank goodness (and good teachers) my children love books as
much as I do. Their yen for new reading material is well satiated by the school
library from September through May. But come summer, the kids ask often to go
to our town’s Abbie Greenleaf Library. There, they know, they will find shelf
upon shelf of books: stories about cats and horses, volumes on tropical
rainforests and science experiments, tales of wizards and orphans and epic
adventures.
Last year the kids got their own library cards, carefully
signing their names, then tucking the small laminated rectangles into their
wallets. They took to carrying these wallets – my son’s a black, faux leather
zip case, my daughter’s a pink canvas tri-fold bedecked in white hearts – with
them whenever we went out, just in case we swung by the library.
We made several trips to Abbie Greenleaf last year and have
been a few times already this summer, the kids perusing the shelves of the
children’s section for just the right book. They have learned to look up titles
in the library’s online catalog – or, even better, to ask the librarians’
advice on the next good read. Often they are lost in the just-checked-out pages
before we have pulled out of the parking lot.
Now that all three of my children willingly read on their
own, they are content to sit for a while in the kid-sized chairs and couches of
the children’s section while I wander to the farther reaches of the library,
searching the long, high shelves for my next reading adventure, running fingers
along spines to find a book that feels right, seeking an interesting title or a
favorite author, peeking at first sentences in search of one that seizes me by
the imagination and sucks me in.
Libraries are more than just books, of course. They are
centers of community and learning and research. I have spent many hours in the
Littleton Library spinning through the microfiche files of old newspapers,
while other patrons read today’s news in the next room. This week I attended a
poetry reading at the Abbie Greenleaf Library, a small-town welcome to Rose
McLarney, this year’s Poet in Residence at The Frost Place just down the road.
I wonder if Robert Frost visited the library when he lived in
Franconia a century ago, if he brought his children here when the building was still
new. The collection would have been quite different then, of course. Probably
there was no children’s section, and perhaps the rooms did not yet carry the
aroma of well-worn pages. Still, it’s nice to think of the poet meandering
along the shelves, running his fingers along the rows of books, while his
children nestled into a quiet corner to read on a rainy summer day.
Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the July 8, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.
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