Ah, the days at the lake. When you rise in the morning to eat donuts from a box on the porch, and watch the sun rise over the lake and the mountains. When you swim on and off all day, and end up exhausted and dizzy from sun and swimming and watching kids act crazy all day (and if you're like me also with a bumpy weird rash from too much sun because you're the opposite of tough). That's when that most wonderful of all vacation spots beckons: the local library.

Where we just were, a cluster of efficiency cabins on Lake George, a few steps away was this:

The Hillview Free Library. The picture doesn't begin to convey its utter awesomeness. The cool of the air. The smell of the old, old books. There's a couch, a basket of board books for the tiny, rows and rows of the original Nancy Drews, plus pristine new hardcovers of a dozen fantasy books your kid will look at and just sigh with happiness.

Of course, it wouldn't be complete without the very kind librarian, who will laboriously fill out one of those vertical cards with horizontal lines, where you write your name and then list all the books you take out. And if your father comes looking for some obscure work of naval navigation and doesn't find it, she will CALL YOUR CABIN OFFICE to let the man there know that she found it, and could she please tell the gentleman who was looking for it that she has it at the front desk for him?

It's only one room, really, separated into three sections. It is a sanctuary and a resource at once. This is an excellent library.

So here's the new feature: do you guys have a library or a librarian that's close to your heart? Send it to me and we will all give a shout out to those perennially undervalued institutions (which covers, I think, both libraries and librarians both). We'll post them here. Send images, too, if you have them.