Friday, August 6, 2010

Over the river and through the woods, to the library we shall go

It's a luxury for us to have a library we can walk to. After years in Spain, we're all still a bit giddy about the magic of it. Even the journey is fun. Walk with us...


Up our street


Along the path by the river




Toward "Emerald Bridge"







Over the bridge, where the river has dropped from flood levels but is
still faster and deeper than when we first arrived.



Past "Squirrel Playground"
  




Past the Jewish high school



The library is a hushed treasure chest of things we can only imagine. You can actually check out magazines! We return our books in an orderly and respectful manner. Of all the people we have encountered in Chicago, we have found the library staff to be the crankiest, or perhaps the most apathetic. They acted like the Gestapo when I tried to get my card, and I had to bring them 3 different pieces of mail before they were satisfied and gave me a real, longer than 3-weeks-valid card. Maybe we will bring them some brownies some day to see if we can sweeten their dispositions.

The kids go to their side to find treasures like Horrible Harry and the Dragon War and Anastasia (for Meg wants to know how much of the movie is realistic and how much is hype.) I take a few magazines, still wondering if there is a limit of how many. So far they have not stopped me! Some days I browse books in an orderly fashion, some days I look for spines that catch my eye. Some days I look for familiar authors. One of these days I will be brave and feature to request a book from another branch. It seems like this should be too much of an inconvenience, but no, you can do it online.

By the time I am ready to go, my big boy has already checked his books out, solemnly handing over his card and putting his books in his green library tote. When I check mine stack out, one of the apathetic ones hands me Nic's printed "receipt" and says, could it be, with the smallest of grins "This belongs to your son."

We wander home again, with our green totes. I have craftily affixed velcro to the pockets of them so that our library cards cannot fall out and get lost (I can only imagine the response of the cranky ones if we dare to lose our cards!)





2 comments:

  1. So fun! Love your walk to the library and that you are all getting to experience the library after years away...oh wait, the kids must really think its awesome since they've only been in Spain! :) I think brownies for the "cranky ones" is a great idea!

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

Related Posts with Thumbnails
http://heatherbetween.blogspot.com/2010/08/over-river-and-through-woods-to-library.html
heatherbetween.blogspot.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-26
93574
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:CQ6VRH24SDBJOCB6FTUUXM7QGDXLN4WF
<urn:uuid:9e20d781-3d10-49e9-83d6-3bc19a18fe3e>
2018-06-22T09:32:28Z
216.58.218.225
text/html
sha1:QRKX73D3S4PJJBOIFLW5AGIVUO7ZJTSF
<urn:uuid:f476cb52-fae4-4298-938b-a7a130b1d9de>
http://heatherbetween.blogspot.com/2010/08/over-river-and-through-woods-to-library.html
response
<urn:uuid:d0333428-617d-44fc-af44-1b6f04f15284>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-165-73-237.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-26
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf