This week’s meme prompts a trip down memory lane:
Whether you usually read off of your own book pile or from the library shelves NOW, chances are you started off with trips to the library. (There’s no way my parents could otherwise have kept up with my book habit when I was 10.) So … What is your earliest memory of a library? Who took you? Do you have you any funny/odd memories of the library?
I have early memories of the library, but not very specific ones.
- I remember walking with my mom and my brother to the library branch that was a couple blocks up the street from our little apartment in Sellwood, Oregon. I was only five.
- Later, I remember joining the summer reading programs and winning lots of prizes!
- I remember holding club meetings of my very important club – though I can’t remember its purpose – at the library after school.
- I remember when my mom finally let me check books out of the “teen” section.
- I remember taking refuge in the cool, air-conditioned library during hot summer months.
- I remember hours and hours of studying at my university’s lovely, five story library full of nooks and crannies and study rooms galore. (I also remember walking through that library on my first date with my husband.)
- Mostly, I remember the books and the librarians (sometimes helpful, sometimes not so much) and the musty smell (of the books, not the librarians).
- Now, I go to my public library about once a month.
Wow! I had no idea I had so many memories and so many libraries. What about you? Do your library memories flit about, or do you have one dominant library that you remember most?
{ 4 comments }
Ah, yes, the smell of the childhood library. Mine was more like dusting polish.
Those summer reading programs sure were fun, weren’t they?
I’m so jealous of all you lucky people who visited libraries as a child!
Weird thing is that my children joined as toddlers, but unfortunately neither, now age 11 & 14, have much of an interest in books!
I have the strongest memories of the library my mother took me to as a child, every week for years! But I do remember clearly all the other libraries from places I’ve lived, and particularly what new books I discovered in them.
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