When I was a little girl, I used to run up ancient wooden stairs to a musty old library that was above our village hall. What wonders it held.
Stereo-optic viewers much older than the Viewmasters that languished in our toy box. But the pictures I beheld were of a time long past in our little corner of Wisconsin. Pictures of rough looking men holding huge hand saws felling trees that were more than 100 years old. Logs filling the ponds at the paper mill. People dressed in their finest to have photos taken of them for a special occasion.
The library was a place of refuge for me. Books took me on journeys that I never dreamed I would go on. Reading about the Champs Elysees and later going there in the winter time when the trees sparkled with tiny white lights.
It's where I discovered Dickens and Austen and books that were supposedly above my reading level.
Then one day we left our little town to come to Los Angeles.
I didn't go to a library except at school for research. Those days you searched through card files and wrote information down on paper and hoped that the book you needed was there. Once you got your information then you wrote it out in handwriting and hopefully you had a typewriter to type your paper. A manual one that didn't self correct. By the time college came, I had bought my own typewriter. An electric one from Sears that had correction tape.
I still read a lot but bought the books out of my salary as a sales clerk.
Now days nearly everything is available at your fingertips via the computer and e-reader.
I love to read.
VISIT YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY!
YOU MIGHT BE SURPRISED.
da bunny
