Finding beauty despite pervasive ugliness.

This morning -- the morning after Election Day 2024 -- after spending time talking to a trusted acquaintance, I drove to the main library branch, which is holding its twice-yearly used book sale. Wrestled with the $64,000 question: park in the parking ramp where I pay when I leave but have to lug my book haul all the way over there, or park in the library lot where there are limited spots and I must feed the meter every hour but which is right next to the library? I opted for the latter. I keep a stash of loose change in my car for precisely this reason.

Spent an hour combing through cookbooks and children’s books. Strictly speaking, I do not need children’s books. My homeschooling days are behind me, my children are all grown, and I have no grandchildren or prospects for any. But my soul needs them — not just today but always. I love to find books that I read to my kids, or that I adored as a child, and add them to the home library of children’s books that I will never part with.

There’s another reason I collect children’s books. Older Daughter has put up a Little Free Library outside her house, and to help her launch it, I gave her a copy of a book she loved growing up. It was intended as a one-time thing. But then I found another of her childhood favorites at a thrift store and gave that to her, too.

This morning at the book sale, old favorites seemed to be everywhere. I filled my bag with them and realized that in giving them to my daughter for her LFL, I am resurrecting happy reading memories and sharing them, in the form of the actual books, with a new generation of young readers. The thought brings me joy.

In a world of ruthless quests for power, of normalized lying, of rebellion against authority and norms, and of malignant self-interest — in short, a national cult of ugliness — there are books, and there are memories, and there are children, and there are ways to bring them all together.

These are the kinds of small things that we who had hoped for better must lean in to.

#simplethings #beauty #joy #books #childrensliterature #littlefreelibrary