The Library

Tucked among a collection of family photos in our living room is a picture of my friend Liz and me when we were little girls. We’re standing outside our hometown library on a rainy summer day, knobby knees sticking out from shorts, raincoats buttoned up against the weather. She’s holding an umbrella under which we’re cozied up, peering at the pages of an open book.  

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.

Changing pace

The merit of changing life’s pace hit me several summers ago, when I spent a few afternoons each week working as a docent at The Frost Place in Franconia. I’ve always enjoyed stopping to smell the roses – both figuratively and literally – but I had recently entered into a new stage of my life, one that involved two babies and plenty of hectic.

Five months earlier, I had become the mother of twins. After several years as a small-town newspaper reporter, with a finger on the pulse of the local communities and a schedule as unpredictable as the news, I was immersed in a new reality of relatively sleepless nights and baby talk, dirty diapers and midnight feedings, caring for two little beings when I’d only really ever had to take care of myself. I’d started doing a little writing from home, but getting out of the house – by myself – was emancipating.

Some days at the farmhouse just down the road and around the bend, where the poet Robert Frost lived nearly 100 years ago, were busy with visitors. Others were quiet, and I would be left alone with poems to read and a couple acres of semi-tamed field and forest and garden to explore. I began noticing wildflowers I’d maybe seen before but never really looked at closely, finding monarch caterpillars munching leaves in a thick stand of milkweed (and, later, their chrysalises, then emerging butterflies), trying to identify the array of birdsong floating through the air and creating its own form of poetry.

One of the books in our small shop in Frost’s former barn – the National Audubon Society’s Field Guide to New England – became my go-to source for information on my new discoveries. At summer’s end, the Dartmouth College intern with whom I had shared docent duties presented the book to me as a parting gift.

The two children who were babies that summer are now 5-year-olds and have a little sister. We look at the book together often, revisiting familiar information and searching its pages to find the new plants and animals we’ve seen or heard. It’s fitting that the book came from a place where Frost lived, as the poet reportedly loved wandering through the local landscape, botanizing all the way.

Life certainly hasn’t become any less hectic since that summer at The Frost Place, with a growing work load of writing projects and three active kids. But as much as life becomes busier with children, it also grows more inquisitive. “Why?” and “How?” are favorite questions, asked endlessly, and we alter the pace of our lives to allow for discovery.

We wander through the fields and forests around our house often, in all kinds of weather, in every season. Moving at a child’s pace, I notice more than I would if I were running or cross-country skiing or biking solo. Looking at the landscape from a child’s perspective becomes a learning experience for all of us.

As we slow down we discover endless wonderful things: the petals of trout lilies curl backwards toward the sunlight, the white springtime blossoms of wood anemones are tinted pink on their backsides, the flowers of the small purple violets growing wild in the woods are shaped like butterflies.

In the spring we listen for the peepers calling from the nearby pond and creep as quietly as we can to the water’s edge; it is never quietly enough to catch one of the tiny frogs in the act of singing. In summer we watch the lupine plants grow higher each week until they burst in purple spikes that fill the back field, and we know where the best stashes of wild blackberries are. In fall, we look for signs of bear along the trail that meanders through the old apple orchard. The tracks through new snow in winter tell us which animals have passed by recently, and we can tell where the red squirrels like to eat by the deep piles of pinecone scales beneath tall trees.

We still get caught up in the craziness of school and meetings, t-ball and swimming lessons, paying the bills and buying the groceries and tending to the endless piles of laundry. But we take the time, especially when things get crazy, to change pace. Change is good, so the saying goes; variety is the spice of life.

A version of this essay appears in this week’s Record-Littleton.