Seven years ago, on a family trip to Park City, UT, we walked down the hill to the park. Our kids were 10, 8, 7, & 5 at the time, so, as you can imagine, they had a significant amount of energy. Normally, this energy would be expended in the resort swimming pool, but that morning there had been an…unfortunate…incident in the pool, and the deck had been closed for sanitation.
On our way to the park, my wife noticed a “cute, fun-looking” library. She decided she wanted to go look around the library, and convinced my oldest daughter (a bookworm), my mother (another bookworm), and my grandmother (a former librarian) to join her. Needless to say, they had a great time exploring the building and its books. In fact, they had such a great time, they took several pictures in from the library to commemorate the outing. In that process, my wife was struck by how much she enjoyed the library, how fun it would be to take a picture at a library in every town and city we ever visited. She wanted to turn library pics into our own type of family postcard or keepsake.
Thus was born the Reed Family Library Selfie. We’ve taken a library pic just about everywhere we’ve gone in the subsequent seven years. Amazingly, we haven’t even covered all the library branches in our own city. At first there was some complaining when my wife would issue the request to pull over so we can take our picture by a library, but we’ve pretty much all gotten into at this point. Even the extended family is into it, and we occasionally get texts from someone with their family in front of a library.
And aren’t libraries awesome? For those who love physical books, libraries are remarkable places for the smell alone, to say nothing of the knowledge, wisdom, joy, heartbreak, infatuation, misery, wonder, discovery, and enlightenment found inside the books when their covers are opened and the dry, earthy aroma of paper and ink is released into the air.
My wife was inspired that day when the first Library Selfie was taken. We look at those pictures—all of them, from all over the world—and remember the places, the purposes, and the people. What an awesome legacy. Thanks Ash!
p.s. – take a #LibrarySelfie, and post it on Instagram or Facebook. We’d love to see where books take you.
