Well, it’s been a while! A while that for me, at least, included a truly terrible summer, and an earthquake of my life, healthwise. However, yesterday in my email I got something truly lovely: a notice that my library was no longer going to charge fines for late books.

This is not (I swear) because I am a late returner. Or at least, it’s mostly not that. It’s just that, I guess, in my heart libraries are among the pure and wonderful things in this world, like a baby’s laugh or a puppy’s tummy. And it hadn’t occurred to me that somehow they might be about to become even better. But it happened!

Right now my local branch doesn’t allow browsing, because of this ongoing horror of a pandemic. But someday it will open again, and I will wander the shelves, and I will find something weird and wonderful that I never knew existed. This is what I imagine, and I just wanted to take a moment to say: Thank you, libraries. For all the excellent unexpected gifts.