A bit of Library Love

I am in love with my library! I can get cookbooks, knitting books, cycling books, blogging books, audio books, movies, documentaries....The list goes on and on. Can you tell the library budget vote was this week?

When I was a kid we had access to a wee little rural library. Our library was so little you had to go outside to change your mind. Hey some jokes never die, you just wish they did. I hated the library when I was a kid! Not because it was small and lacked variety, but because they wanted the books back! When I love something I tend to want to keep it near me. When I read a book and enjoyed the story I thought it should be mine. I hated returning my books, just because the library thought they should keep them.

When we moved off the farm, we moved into an area that could not access the local town library. I still managed to spend some time there but I was not able to really fundamentally use that library.

After D and I got married and moved to Florida I was bored and alone much of the time. Till D told me about the library. You see I had been so long without a usable one that I had forgotten. I jumped in the pickup and hightailed it over to get a library card. I think I spent 3-4 days a week in that library till we moved 3 months later.

Then we moved to what I still think of as the mecca of the library system, Charleston County South Carolina. Our apartment complex was 6 blocks from a branch library. (Yes that was part of the reason we picked that apartment complex.) In Charleston, they pool all the money not by town but by county and have a strong base to buy from. I could borrow books from any of the county's locations and return to my local branch. I can not tell you how many late fees I avoided. Hubby would point out here how many late fees I did pay even with that but we will not talk about that! I loved wandering around the beautiful downtown Charleston branch. It was there that I looked into kinship and learned what a 4th cousin twice removed is. (Yeah I forgot about that one a bit.) I found out just how awesome it is to have a great library at your disposal.

Then we moved to NY. Our first library was in this great old church building, complete with stained glass. However it was small and staffed by people that treated you like dirt. Rude and aggressive, not my  ideal librarian! So I went to the next community over and found out I could use it but in a somewhat limited fashion. But the big bonus was the librarians were decent and polite! Imagine that!

When we started looking into buying a house I knew what library system I truly wanted to be part of. They have expanded since then and hold the second favorite library spot in my heart. We passed the budget by over 75% approval.

The thing I don't get is why people don't use libraries more. You're already paying for it, you should make sure you're getting your money's worth! I know that I am. I may even be getting several people's money's worth!