The Lost Library

 Hello,

Admittedly, this post is a bit of a vent for me as well as a lament. I had an experience my local library this week that made me very sad and feel lost in a place that was always familiar to me. Goes to show what happens when you leave for a few years. When you come back, you come back to new terrain. Things just don't stay the same.

I've written about my old library before. When I was little, it was in an old one-room schoolhouse, and I loved that place. I spent hours there with my mom and siblings pouring over books and taking home mountains of them to read. 

The thing about that library was that it was familiar. Back then, the books seldom changed. You could always count on finding old favorites in the exact place they were before. Inter-library loan wasn't as functionable as it is today. But I liked that. 

Furthermore, the library was full of informational books and classics. I knew exactly where to go to find books on dolphins, otters, whales or underwater archaeology. I made friends with Robert Louis Stevenson, knew where Dickens lived and could always find the daunting Les Miserables in its place. 

My library was simple, but lovely.

When I grew older, the library moved out of the old schoolhouse. It got its own building next to the school. It had beautiful, artsy doors, lots of space, but even though inter-library loan had become more of a thing, I could still count on finding classics and informational books. 

This past week, however, I went into the library, hoping to get a stack of informational books to look over for research purposes, but I couldn't find any. 

There was the usual children's section which looked oddly foreign with this cardboard cutout of a lady that looked like she could be an old-fashioned airplane stewardess. Too real to be comfortable. She could have walked over and started talking to me. The phrase, "uncanny valley" comes to mind.

To the right of the children's section were about five bookshelves of works of fiction, but they weren't fiction I'd read. They were all modern. I scanned the shelves dutifully, looking for classics or any books that I would want to take out, but there were none.  

In a panic, I looked at the other shelves. One book shelf of teen fiction, one of biographies, one small section of history, (not even a whole shelf!), a few shelves of how-to books, one of audiobooks, and four rows of videos I didn't bother with looking at.

I left empty-handed and saddened. I know I could have ordered some books to read. The classics were still there, somewhere out in another library, but they weren't where they were supposed to be. 

I talked to other people in my town, and they say that they see other patrons of the library order huge stacks of books, sit at the tables and study them. I think it's a bit sad that our library doesn't have the books at our library, but I know they only have so much space.

Perhaps this post should have been titled, Lost in the Library. It would have been true as well, but I think it's a double-whammy for me. This library no longer feels like home. It feels foreign. It feels lost.

Until next time...

Julia Garcia / Arysta Henry