LIBRARY

 

LIBRARY

I was walking with my teenage son

Talking

A rare occasion

I told him one of the things

I missed during the pandemic 

Is the library

He of course couldn't understand why

The library is a refuge

A place of discovery and possibility

Where silence is cherished 

Guarded

Expected

When the new Elmhurst library opened

I started taking out non-fiction books

And rediscovered my love of reading

Along the way I had lost this passion

When I was a teen I looked forward 

To buying a book every week

Novels

Russian

French

English

American

I read them

Some hundreds of pages long

I noticed when I started to read again 

I lacked the stamina

But after a few books I regained it and could 

Read for hours

Taking the journey with the writer

To Honduras to find a lost Mayan city

Or to Liberia to treat Ebola patients

After fifteen or so books

Life got busy again and I stopped reading

Every so often I would still go to the library

Hoping to find a book that would get me back

And once in a while I would