My first true love

I don't remember when it was I fell in love (I was so young!), but I fell hard and it was for life. Oh, Washington Local Library, you own my heart and soul. The library I fell for wasn't the most beautiful library nor was it very large, but it was the library I grew up with, so it will always be my first, the one I remember with the most love.

The library was filled with so many possibilities. So many books! (oh, it smelled so wonderful. Every library has that amazing scent to it. Don't you want to go into every library and just take it in?) I wanted to read every single book. A library is perfect for an obsessive kid like me: I will read every single "Little House" book. I will read every "Ramona" book. I will read every book on this shelf. And the next one.

When I was a kid, I read and read. But when you had a kid's library card, you had a limit to the number of books you could check out. I would check out as many books as I could every single time. With a little luck, I could maybe talk my dad into checking out a couple of extra books for me. I loved the summer, when I could spend hours reading. ("Go outside!" my mom would beg. "You can't read all day!" Oh, I think I can.) Like every relationship, there were bumps in the road. One summer I signed up for one of those reading programs where they would display the number of books each kid read. Piece of cake, I thought. After the first week, I brought in my first stack of books to the librarian. "I've read all these," I declared proudly. The librarian replied, "You have to read the whole thing, not just the back cover." "I know. I read all of these." I was so excited. I thought she'd be so impressed. Instead she insisted that there was no way I read all of those books. I realized that I didn't need a stupid program to read books. I took my books and never told her about a single one the entire summer.

The library was where there were some of my first milestones of growing up. One day you went from the children's card to the "adult" card. You knew you were growing up when you stopped reading the books written for children and start reading the books that were simply just written. When you got your books from the adult side of the library. When you learned the Dewey Decimal system. I started feeling like a grown-up in the library. (Is it any wonder that the library was the place I'd sneak kisses with a certain boy when I was in high school?)

I didn't always treat the library right. I wasn't always the best about returning my library books. I'd always have a book or two that got lost under my bed, in the back of a closet. I'm not sure why I couldn't get it together, but it was like this crazy thing I had to do. "Here's all your books back but this one!" Maybe it's my tell. Maybe some day I'll commit the perfect crime except I'll leave one overdue library book at the scene. But I'd like to think that the library wouldn't actually let me down.