Dear Library

When I was a child, my little legs would struggle up your steps and into the children’s room. My own room. Even your name was full of wonder – Sandeman. A story by itself.

You held boxes of brightly coloured tales that were just for me. I could pick them out and sit on your tiny chairs and look at the pictures, or pile books up high and wobble to the desk with as many as I could carry, and then take them home! The little orange card that said my name, the lady who briskly stamped the tickets.

Shelves on all sides of the tall walls for the books without pictures, books for older children, books for my future when I could read long words in tiny type.

It was exciting to know there were Other Rooms. Autobiography, Geography, Travel, Romance, History, Crime. Another set of stairs I’d yet to climb. When I peered up the stairwell I could smell the past and one day I’d find there were maps up there, and newspapers yellowed by time.

But too soon the days of devouring books for fun were gone. Far too fast the world of chocolate factories and Swedish diamond thieves and enchanted trees swept by and, suddenly, I only visited you to escape the very stimulation you used to provide.

I used you for endless hours of panicked scribbling, revisiting all I had learned at school as I tried to pass my exams.

‘Another hour, and then I can go home’, I’d promise myself, when once I had begged to stay.

A few years passed and I swapped you for a towering building in another city. It was full of things I’d never understand and, once again, I sat late into the night looking for quotes to illustrate my academic arguments.

We both knew this wasn’t really me, but it was something I had to do. Beaudelaire, Foucault, Leavis, Barthes – these weren’t stories and what they contained left me cold. You seemed to sense that I was lost, and maybe that’s why you lead me to Wilde and Burns, Kelman, MacDougall, Banks, Muir, Morgan and Gray.

But I was tired of reading. Ten books a week was just too much. So many of them seemed cold and empty, and they didn’t stoke the fire that burns within me to hear stories. To read about heartbreak, loss, love, longing and belonging. The human condition.

We didn’t see each other for a while. I turned my back on you when you had done nothing wrong. But you knew I’d be back one day.

Now I help little legs struggle up a different set of steps and watch as they search through boxes of brightly coloured tales and trail their hands across shelves of endless possibilities.

My heart is fit to burst as I watch them settle into tiny chairs and follow words with their fingers, eagerly turning pages as they disappear into worlds that you provide for them without end.

I have fallen in love with you again.

You should know that, even when I left you, I never stopped believing in your power to change the world.

And I never will.

Love, Linda.