For the love of words, books, and libraries

This sto­ry was first pub­lished in The Winchester Sun.

Even though the sun is shin­ing on this August after­noon, I am smack dab in the mid­dle of the bed in the guest room of my home. Scattered at my feet are no less than sev­en books. Two are from my per­son­al library; five oth­ers I checked out of the Clark County Public Library. I can­not imag­ine my life with­out a book.

When I start­ed school at Poage Elementary in Ashland, Kentucky, Mrs. Wurts was the teacher every par­ent want­ed their child to have. In my case, fol­low­ing my sis­ter was a bit of the kiss of death. Jana was two years old­er and, to be hon­est, took school seri­ous­ly. She was a bet­ter math stu­dent, bet­ter test tak­er, and, well, just more inclined to be “Most Likely to Succeed.”

I, on the oth­er hand, in first grade, where I am total­ly sure Jana shined like the North Star, floun­dered. And to be total­ly not with­hold­ing, I sort of did most of my life in aca­d­e­mics, at least until college.

You see, I want­ed to read, and my moth­er promised me that when you went to school, that’s what teach­ers did — they taught stu­dents to read. Much of the first grade, espe­cial­ly the first three weeks, was ded­i­cat­ed to some­thing called the alpha­bet, strange fig­ures called num­bers and let­ters, and these bor­ing things called col­or­ing sheets with crayons.

Enough of this stuff. Where was the one thing Momma had promised — where was the read­ing and the books I so craved?

One after­noon, Mrs. Wurts hand­ed me an enve­lope and said I was to give it to my moth­er. I thought noth­ing of it until Momma called me to the kitchen table and asked me to take a seat. Since I couldn’t read, the let­ter was just a group of strange sym­bols and let­ters, but in her trem­bling hand, I knew it was some­thing bad.

Momma informed me that Mrs. Wurts thought maybe I should stay anoth­er year as I did not know my num­bers, col­ors, or let­ters. I could not write or col­or neat­ly like the oth­er stu­dents. I remem­ber I looked into my mother’s bright blue eyes over­flow­ing with salty tears and said, “But you told me they would teach me to read.”

I am sure some sort of teacher con­fer­ence ensued over my reac­tion. And I am sure that once I began read­ing, I was in heav­en. What is more impor­tant, I began a love affair that September. Despite a math class where my sis­ter excelled and I bare­ly passed, I got to trav­el out west with Laura Ingalls Wilder on her wag­on with her fam­i­ly. I also worked side-by-side with George Washington Carver as he found use after use for the peanut.

As I grew old­er, Practically Seventeen kept me won­der­ing if I would ever date a foot­ball play­er like the main char­ac­ter. Even as an adult, I am in the room with each char­ac­ter like a detec­tive, watch­ing every move, smelling the cof­fee or bour­bon they pour into a crys­tal glass. I am thankful.

For my fam­i­ly, a book is a trea­sure — and equal­ly, so are the libraries that store these vol­umes. I can­not think of a career more enjoy­able and reward­ing than I had. But, much to my cha­grin, school test­ing replaced time to research, read, and lose one’s self in the pages of a book.

A library is home to those of us who get lost in a book and are friends with the char­ac­ters who make deci­sions like we do, love the way we do, and come alive each time we open the pages of a book. For a lit­tle girl so long ago, the idea of read­ing made her what she was to become: a lover of words, a lover of books, and on this August after­noon, a true lover of libraries. For many chil­dren and adults, our pub­lic library is a haven. It is a place where one can read, learn, and not be told to learn your col­ors or num­bers first.