Searching The South

I have returned to the scene of the crime.

My mother first brought me here when I was four. She had me reading then. By five I was joining in on the readers contests here. The VFW meets here now. It smells clean, sterile, Pine-sol permeates the air. It’s no longer a library. That has been moved to a newer, “better” building here in town.

That new building doesn’t have the smell of paper, ink and binding glue. It doesn’t have decades of “shhhhh” embedded in its walls. The floor doesn’t creak as old wood floors do. It’s not a place i enjoy going to.

Now, they are allowed to talk in the library. They don’t have the reverence they should to enter a temple of knowledge in order to worship at it’s altar.

I am a worshipper in a strange church and the librarians of old are preachers without pulpits.

I want it back.