And then I fell to the floor

The girls and I have a summer plan of getting together with Kieren, Dayden, Kiersi and the grandparents on Fridays this summer with the intention of taking all the kids to the New Castle library and having lunch. Sounds fun, whether lunch or the library is your focus.

We're going to the library because of a strange contretemps Pat and Angie have experienced since moving into their house some years back. As it turns out, when you live out in the country surrounded by ALL THAT NATURE, you might not be able to avail yourself of your county's library services, perhaps because your library, with a deplorable lack of foresight, doesn't exist. In their county? The library belongs to the nearest city and if you live outside that city's limits, I guess you're just doomed to illiteracy or boredom. There are no branch libraries like there are in my city.

In New Castle, where Nanny and Poppy live, the library is called the New Castle-Henry County Public Library, which is generous of them, don't you think? Nanny checks items for Kieren, Dayden and Kiersi out on her library card, warning them all not to lose any books or risk her substantial wrath which would be....not getting a cookie for a mid-afternoon snack? I don't know. She scares me half to death, so I've never lost a book she's checked out for me.

So I was telling Aisling our summer plans and said, "Doesn't that sound like fun?" in eager happiness, because libraries have figured largely in my life, just as they have in hers. My mom took me and Pat to the library when we were kids and we brought home stacks of books. Towers. Skyscrapers of books. And that continued on into my adult years when I once checked out an entire tote of sixty books for Meelyn and Aisling, read every single one of them to the girls, and then put the tote box in the trunk of my car and forgot about it until all sixty books were three weeks overdue. Oh, my husband was so pleased! He credits the New Castle-Henry County Public Library's recent renovation and expansion to the fines I paid for that little mistake.

Aisling looked at me in the way teenagers sometimes do, not really with a curled lip and scornful eyebrows, but with the impression of such. "It sounds okay," she yawned, examining her fingernails. "But you know, I don't really like libraries that much, not like you do. I'm not that crazy about reading."

And that, gentle readers, is when everything SUDDENLY WENT BLACK.