Thank you for celebrating National Library Week 2020 and Day of the Child with us these past few weeks! We miss seeing our community at the Library and we want you to know we are still here for you online! Librarian Angelique was recently inspired reading the many love letters to libraries on Story Corps and wanted to share her own letter with you all!
My love affair with libraries…
This is no ordinary love story, no, this is the story of all the places I’ve been and the people I’ve loved along the way. Some of the places I’ve travelled to, and some of the people I’ve met are real. But, for all the other places I’ve journeyed to and people I’ve come to love exist only in stories I couldn’t bring myself to put down and places I could only dream of visiting one day.
I’m going to be honest, I have a terrible memory. I can’t tell you my first exact memory of when I went to a library or the first book I truly loved (I have loved many) but what I can tell you is that throughout my life, in joyful times as well as heartbreaking, I found myself searching out my closest library. It was a quiet place to study in my youth, or to wander the stacks to see what called to me.
When I was a teen my mother died in a bicycle accident. I spent those days heartbroken, searching out newspaper articles looking for something to answer all my questions about her accident. On lonely days when I didn’t know what to do with myself, I would find a chair and watch the creek outside the local library in Boulder roll by as I just stared out the big windows, finding comfort in people, surrounded by books and the quietness.
After college my partner at the time and I moved to a new state, living out of our truck in the National Forest Service. We spent our days at the library working on our resumes, using the computers free of charge, applying for jobs and looking for a place to rent. Later, as a teacher, I could spend hours in the children’s section with the help from the librarian, picking out all the books I wanted to share with my students that would send them on journeys of their own.
Four years ago I left my job to travel throughout Africa for four months, knowing I would have to start over when I got back.
My love affair for books and libraries gave me the confidence to say “why not me?” and apply for a library job. This library took a chance on me, and I can say I found my place, here, in a library, with quite a few people that I call friends, all the books I could ever dream about, and a community that inspires, especially now more than ever, when we are all looking for comfort, direction, and hope.
– Angelique