Ethyl Remembers the Library.

Books, those wonderful things we remember from our childhood, are slowly going the way of the horse and buggy.  They are being replaced with all kinds of digital devices. Devices that display words on a computer screen and shine light in our eyes.  The Nook and the Kindle, the I Pad and the I Phone,  are slowly doing away with those wonderful vehicles we held in our hands, curled up with in a chair, went to sleep with on our pillows, and laughed out loud at in study hall.
Nothing feels like paper and ink, or smells like it, for that matter.  That musty smell of cellulose slowly decomposing, of paper becoming brittle, and finally going back to the dust.  For wood will do that, unlike in ancient times when books were made of linen or cotton.
I remember the little library of my childhood.  It was a little cinder block building with a bandstand on top,  I think.  If my memory serves me right, it was located down the hill from Front Street in Iuka, under some trees, in a little place called Jay Bird Park.  When you entered the door the smell would invite you in.  That musty smell of the books.  Waiting for me to pick one up, take it home, and devour it in a night or two.  For once I started reading, I couldn't put off seeing how it would end.  Crying over the sad parts, laughing out loud at the funny ones.  To a young Mississippi farm girl who had never been more than a few hundred miles from home in her entire life, a book was the means by which she could travel to far away places, dream of knights in shining armor, fall in love with the heroine, swash buckle with the hero, explore the wilds of an African jungle or float over the watery streets of Venice in her gondola.
Saturday was usually the day the farmers in and around Iuka went to town.  My daddy always took his corn to the crusher to have feed made for the cows on Saturday and I would often ride with him in his old beat up pickup truck and while he waited at the crusher for his burlap bags of feed, I would steal away to the library and spend an hour or more pondering over which great adventure I was going to have that week.  Would I be shipwrecked with Robinson Crusoe, endure the horrors of war with Scarlet O'Hara, or maybe just try and figure out Mr. Darcy with Elizabeth Bennett.  I loved Dame Daphne's Rebecca or Jamaica Inn or My Cousin Rachel, although I always hated how that one ended.
When the town of Iuka built the new library and did away with the small one in Jay Bird Park it was progress.  But there was something sad about seeing it go.  I had long since married and moved away but one day I took my niece, who was a junior in high school, to the new library to do some research and I missed the smell.  The new library was much bigger and everything in it smelled new.  The musty, dank smell of the old one was missing.  And with it a time in my life when I traveled to far away places, had wonderful adventures, and dreamed of all the doors that would someday open in my life.  And many of those doors opened because of a small little library in a small little park in a small little town in Tishomingo County.