The Library

The best thing about summer was swimming lessons and the best thing about swimming lessons was the library. The Idaho Falls Municipal Swimming Pool was a short couple of blocks from the Idaho Falls Public Library. Woolworth’s was right around the corner, but that is a discussion for another day. My mother, once out of the house and that close to the library, could often be persuaded to drive the extra couple of blocks to the library. Once I entered those magic doors, the rest of the world fell away. It was just me and a big room full of books. Nobody had to tell me to be quiet. It was quite simply the most wonderful place I had ever been.

Looking back, it wasn’t such a large building. The library was made of purplish red bricks with a wide staircase flanked by imposing white pillars, not a common sight in Southeastern Idaho. The glass doors opened to the wonderful smell of old books and bindings. The bottom floor held tables for studying, the Children’s Section, the nonfiction, and, of course, the check out counter. Upstairs on a balcony that went clear around the building was the adult fiction. When I was in high school I heard about the section under lock and key which was also downstairs, inconveniently located behind the circulation desk.

My library card was pink cardboard with a metal piece on it that held my number. I signed that card when I was six or seven. I could check out any book in the Children’s Section by showing that card. I carried that responsibility with all the dignity my skinny shoulders could muster. I was so careful with the books from the library that the wholesale marking of books I was introduced to in college was shocking, a sacrilege. I walked along the stacks lightly touching the spines of the books. I met Pippi Longstocking and Mary Poppins, Caddie Woodlawn, My Friend Flicka, and Misty of Chincoteague Bay. I read about the Bobsey twins and a horse called Fury and Betsy, Tacey, and Tib. I wandered in The Secret Garden and cried over Black Beauty. The hardest thing about going to the library was choosing. I could only check out two books at a time. During swimming lesson season I would race through the books and go back for more the next day. I learned early on to pick long books for the winter, books I couldn’t get through in a day or two. It was much harder to get Mom to drive us to the library in the winter over the snowy roads. It was also harder to race through a book when I went to school five days a week and had homework as well as household chores.

When I reached the mature age of fourteen, I was allowed into the adult fiction section. That first climb up into the balcony opened new vistas for me. Now I read the Bronte sisters and Jane Austin. I fell in love with Heathcliff and Mr. D’Arcy. I got dreamily lost in the jungles of Green Mansions. I thrilled to the swashbuckling adventure stories like The Count of Monte Cristo. I swallowed authors whole and then went on to cultures. A Tale of Two Cities just naturally led to Les Miserables. When I was sixteen or seventeen I read War and Peace and couldn’t stop reading Russian literature until I had absorbed all the library had to offer. My parents were more than a little concerned about my Russian period, my father worked for the government and the Cold War was in full swing.

I graduated from high school and went to college, where I found that libraries could take up more than one room. Summer vacations I went to the library in Idaho Falls and checked out books to fill coffee breaks and lunch hours and those long summer evenings when I felt stirred up and restless. I married young and moved first to Menan, a tiny farming community, then to Shelley, another dot on the map. I read constantly during my first pregnancy, but not library books. I was too far from the library to check books out when I went to town. I just wasn’t sure when I would get back. I read some of the books on my mother in law’s shelf and reread some of my own books. After my beautiful baby girl was born, I found it even harder to get to the library, so I bought paperbacks. And so it happened that I didn’t get back to that hallowed hall before it was remodeled in the early ‘70s. I have driven by the new Idaho Falls Public Library; now even the new expanded version seems small. Worse, it looks modern. It isn’t the same place at all, although it occupies the same lot. The magic is gone.


Rinda Fullmer (who still loves libraries)
Copyright 2006