Runner-up Creative Essay Contest

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As a child, I knew that trips to the library were to be a part of my routine, as much as brushing my teeth, or picking up toys, but not one that had to be told to me more than once. Like savoring a warm meal with family, it was part of what we did as children, part of what our parents taught us to do. I was fortunate enough to have parents who graduated from college before people had televisions in their homes. They were both voracious readers, and they passed that on to me. One of my earliest memories is of the children’s department of our library in suburban Virginia . I remember the fluorescent lights, the seemingly infinite number of books from which to choose, and the fact that the walls were always the most pristine shade of white. As an adult, I look back and understand that my devotion to libraries has marked some of the most joyful times in my life, as well as the saddest.
 
In the carefree days of childhood, my libraries were a place of pure enjoyment. My mother volunteered at both my school library, and the local library a mile from my home. Mom had been an English major before becoming a mother to six, and by spending time with us at the library she could be surrounded by her two favorite things: her children, and books. As a child, I felt that the library was a place of endless possibilities, and it was my mother’s introduction to that world that made those possibilities come alive.
 
As I entered my young adulthood, and suffered through my mother’s sudden passing, libraries became a source of refuge. I was a new college graduate, overweight, grief stricken, and having entered into a career that was saturated with applicants, unemployed. In the library, I found shelves of books that did not judge my struggles with weight, and pages of literature that allowed me to indulge in them without the expectation that I spend a single cent. Amidst my sadness and grief, I found a place where I was not judged.  How proud my mother would be that I found solace within the place where she taught me to feel safe and welcomed.
 
Years later, when I moved to Middletown , Connecticut , the city that would become my home, I made plans to get a library card. I was living in an apartment, still not sure where I wanted to settle permanently, but when I became a patron of the Russell Library, all of that changed. I felt as though I was home again. At Russell, I found a place that I did not want to leave.
 
Ten years after moving to Middletown , I am in a home that I purchased, so that I could stay near this library that I have come to love so much.    It is a place where I always feel welcome, and one in which those joys of childhood are rekindled on a regular basis. Certainly, this is a library that I visit for that seemingly infinite number of books that I recall from childhood, and now there are DVDs and CDs to add to that list of choices. For me, though, it is about more than the books, and the other forms of diversion. It is about even more than the people who surround me when I am there.  It is about the warmth and safety that I feel when I am at my library. It is about the discovery of why libraries can take us home again.