Reading is something I have always enjoyed. I love diving into the adventures and conspiracies of both Fiction and Non-Fiction books. Not only is reading fun to do, but it is also good for people to read. Reading books reduces stress, increases knowledge, improves comprehension, and expands vocabulary. It even boosts our critical thinking and improves our problem-solving skills. The Madison Library District supports and encourages kids to read books so they will become more happy, intelligent people.

One of my favorite things about the Madison Library District is that they support reading during the summer. Every summer, the library puts a lot of work and effort into the Summer Reading Program. This program encourages kids, teenagers, and even adults to read during the summer. It makes reading even more fun and exciting. I love all of the fun prizes and coupons that we can earn by reading a certain number of pages.

Over the summer, my family went on many trips. Sometimes, car rides can get very chaotic. Before we go on any trips, we always go to the Madison Library and get an audio book. My family and I have really enjoyed listening to books while we are traveling. We listened to the whole Fablehaven series and almost the whole Dragonwatch series. Without the public library, our road trips would have been very boring. I am very grateful for all of the audio books the library has.

One of my least favorite things when it comes to reading is having to wait until I can read the next book in the series. Then, one day, I heard that the Madison Library District has Speedy Reader Kits! I thought that this was the most brilliant, amazing idea ever that the whole entire series is in one bag. No more waiting for someone to turn in the next book in the series so I can check it out!

The Madison Library District puts a lot of their effort and time into the activities, contests, clubs, and events for all ages. I think these activities are really cool. To me, these activities show me that the library is a safe, friendly, and positive environment where people both old and young can increase intellectually and become better people. The vibes that I get when I walk into the library are positive, calm, and happy. I love how organized the library is. Finding books is simple. All you need to know is the last name of the author. If someone can’t remember the author, they can always look it up on one of the two computers available for looking up books on the website. I am also glad that the library has a website. I like being able to see what books are available. It is also really awesome to be able to put books on hold.

​To me, the Madison Library District is a place where I can go to read and check out books. The library is where people can go to get free access to a wealth of knowledge that is difficult to find elsewhere. The library has encouraged me and many others to read. I am very thankful for the Madison Library District and for everything it has done for the community. 

When I think of the Madison library, I think of how helpful the staff are. Without them I would not know half the stuff I know. In this essay I will share my personal experiences with members of the staff and how they helped me to write my forthcoming history of the library distract.

One day at the library, I was searching the shelves for a book to read. I found a book on the Boise Public Library District's history, but decided it wasn't the right one because I wasn't interested. But it got me thinking; what if the Madison Library District had a similar history? So, I did the one thing I knew to do: ask a librarian. When I asked Courtney about it, she directed me to "Madison Best Remembered," a book on the history of Madison County. It only touched briefly, on the library so I thought, "Why don't I write a history of the Madison library?"

I started by basic observation. I believe that by looking at the contents of a building (pictures, plaques, murals, etc.) you can get a good idea of a building's history. After looking through the library, I had just that: a good idea of the building's history, but I needed to learn more. I asked Cheryl if she could guide me to more resources. She directed me to the library's website, which had a history of the library on it. This sent me on an internet rabbit hole on the library's history, which led me to articles and a blog on the library's expansion of 2009-10, though most of the photos were missing.

At this point, the history that I knew spanned 1921-2010, so there were no documents covering the years from then to the present. When I asked Gina about this, she suggested I talk to Valerie.

Around this time Vivian passed away. I didn't have a lot of experience working with her since she was over the children's books, but when I was looking through the library blog, i found this:

"In order to get the water pipes in the correct places for the new sprinkler system, the construction company had to knock a hole in the southwest corner of the existing building. This hole just happened to coincide with our Young Adult section of the library. Vivian, our Children's and YA Librarian, moved and rearranged all the books in that corner in order to accommodate the construction. It was quite an effort on her part, and she did a tremendous job!"

After Vivian's funeral I was able to talk with Valery. She mentioned records that the library had in storage and she helped me look through them. Valery told me they would have to be digitized, so I put the effort on pause until they were.

Recently, I was taking to Rebekka about the project and about the construction blog with the missing photos. She then told me of how the library has photos stored on their computer.

​During this three-year journey, the help from the library staff has been constant and supportive. Without them my work-in-progress history would never come to fruition. Despite my young age, I feel like I have a wonderful team backing me up.

            My Grandma Helen was always reading, and nine times out of ten, it was a book she had gotten from the Madison County Library. Being a school teacher from the hills of Kentucky, she wanted to instill the value of reading in her children and grandchildren. In the late 1990’s - early 2000’s, specifically during to the summer time, my brother and I could be found spending a day at the library with her, signing up for the Summer Reading Program, finding books that interested us, and making memories.

         I didn’t start out a great reader, but Grandma Helen made sure that I always had access to the library if I wanted to be one. Knowing that she would always be willing to take me to the library anytime I wanted to go, I began finding the books that I knew I could finish within the checkout time frame and exploring the worlds available to me through books.  I was always nervous to renew a book in case there was another person that wanted to read it and I was taking too long. But as the years went on and I began to find a reading pattern that suited my needs, the library became a sanctuary that I could find myself in, and it didn’t matter how long it took me to read the books available. 
We lived close enough that I could walk or even ride my bike to the library on good days. Some times after school, at the “Old Junior High” (now the school district office), I would walk there to finish up some research or pick out a new book to read that I couldn’t find in the school library. If they didn’t have the book I was looking for, the librarians were always so nice in getting it from another library in the network for me.

            The Summer Reading Program always had the best prizes. From small trinkets to ice cream cones to much more. There was always something available that would spark the interest of a growing child to read. It took a few years before I was comfortable enough with reading to be able to get the prizes I wanted, but when I did, it was like I had made a huge life accomplishment equivalent to “graduating high school” in my mind.

         My father tells me stories of growing up and studying at the library. He tells the tale of the “old blue-green rock library” that was build new in the 1960’s were his elementary school teachers would take his classes to visit the children’s section that was located in the basement.  That library was destroyed by the Teton Dam Flood in 1976 and the current library was built to replace it.  The “new library” was the favorite spot for his nerdy school “gang” with the North-East corner always being the optimal spot to study. He would even take us kids to the favorite spot to read in the winters, if he had a day off. Another favorite spot of mine was by the fire place, snuggled up with a book, getting lost in the warmth.

         I found that the librarians were always patient while listening to a young girl ramble on about all the books she was checking out. Valarie and many others always had the best recommendations and the biggest smiles. Even though they see so many people, I always felt like I was the most important person that the librarians had talked to that day.

       When I moved out of state for college, I went to the local library in my new town, looking for the same feeling that the Madison County Library always provided. I was disappointed that it didn’t feel the same. Sure, I still had the same access to the same books and still had amazing adventures in the pages, but it wasn’t home. One of the first things I did when I moved back to Rexburg was make sure that my library card was still active.

          I don’t make it in to the library as often as I would like to with work and responsibilities now. It’s hard to make time in this hectic, modern world for the things that we love.  It is a goal of mine for the new year to come, to see the inside of the library more often. The Madison County Library services many people, but it will always be a part of me, no matter the changes that it or I may face. This is one of the few places that I will keep as dear in my heart as my Grandma Helen once did when she was alive. I will always hold my Madison County Library Card so that my grandmother can be proud of the person I am and the love I have for books that she helped cultivate when I was five years old.  A fond place brings fond memories.  The Madison County Library does that for me.
 

I am an adult. Admittedly, adulthood has its perks, but as everyone over twenty will agree, the world of an adult includes disillusionment. So many delightful and charming arrangements, alive and well and taken for granted in the mind of a child, simply break down in the cold realities of the Real World. The map of a child’s imagination is full of happy landmarks of the way things should be--of course the hero wins, the orphans are adopted, evil is banished, and the enemies become friends. In the world of the adult, something that sounds like a fairy tale probably is one; most delightful and charming arrangements are just too good to be true. However, there is one delightful and charming arrangement that exists in both the Land of How Things Should Be and the Real World, something too good to be true but nonetheless real, and that true-life fairy tale is the library.

I have always loved public libraries. You walk in, nice library people point you to your favorite sections, you can choose any books you like to take home, and it's all for free. Hundreds and hundreds of volumes, delicious consumables of adventure, fantasy, information, and emotion, sit waiting on the shelves. Comfortable seating and good lighting abound. Anyone can come in, anyone can belong there, anyone can stay. The fascinating book covers, the comforting weight of thick hardback copies, the drawers of lightweight paperbacks, the slightly dusty, slightly spicy smell of countless paper pages together under one roof--it’s all my happy place. I still feel like a kid in a candy shop whenever I walk into the library.

One of the first things I did when I came to Rexburg in 1991 as a student of Ricks College was to locate the public library. I was missing my life back home and needed the familiar therapy of shelves and books and card catalogs. The Madison Library was a much smaller affair then, but it had the books and quiet I craved, and I was comforted. Years later, in 1999, I was surprised to find myself a more permanent resident of Rexburg when my husband took a job teaching at the soon-to-be four-year university, and again I sought out the Madison Public library, this time with three babies (and later a fourth) in tow. The library regularly saved my young-mother sanity. We checked out stacks of picture books to read every week, and the kids and I spent many hours in the children’s section; they would watch the fish in the fish tank and play the learning games on the computers, while I sat gratefully in a nearby arm chair and read novels and parenting magazines. We kept coming as the kids grew, and the library became one of our most important locations in town. Sometimes for fun, sometimes for activity kits, sometimes for homework, sometimes for bathrooms, sometimes for questions, sometimes for phone access, sometimes for internet access, and always for more books, we came to the library.

Another unbelievable yet real gift to us from the Madison Library is its programs. Free access to books and cozy corners in which to read them is amazing by itself, but the Madison Library also has book parties! Over the past twenty years, as our kids have grown up and we’ve grown old, we’ve been to them all. Charming storytimes for the toddlers, exciting bookclubs for mid-grade kids, cool book-themed gatherings for teens, and relaxing and interesting book discussions and clubs for adults make the Madison library a most happening place in town. The absolute highlight of our library fun for the year always comes in the summer, in the form of the famous summer reading program. Some wizard-librarian of annual and inexhaustible creativity puts together a wonderful plan for the whole family that includes exciting themes, appealing incentives and activities, and clever prizes, adding zest and purpose to our summer every year. And, as if that isn’t enough, faithful and determined adult readers who make it through 3000 pages or more can earn entry to the crowning event of the season--the adult summer reading party! My husband and I honestly look forward to it all year. This exclusive event is full of delicious food, free books, hilarious games and activities, impressive prizes, and the undeniable camaraderie of book-lovers getting together to do nothing else but celebrate reading. It is truly the stuff of fairy tales.

Everything else aside, I think my favorite thing about the Madison Library, and all public libraries, is this: their very existence means that we believe in intellectual freedom for all. For once, there is something that belongs to all of us that is simply there to make life, and society, better. We are lucky beneficiaries of something remarkable, something too good to be true but nonetheless real. There is at least one thing in Real Life that is just as it should be.
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As technology progresses and more and more titles are available in digital form, the future of public, physical libraries is sometimes called into question. Well, not with this girl. I will always need my public library. For the past 30 years, I have loved coming to the library next to the Tabernacle, and I intend to keep doing it. Happy 100 years, Madison Public Library!

The last time I heard my father speak my name was when I had finished reading to him.

“My Caitie Bug.” he had said simply, after I closed the book. My throat tightened and my stomach ached. I wanted to cry, but I felt numb. I had cried so much the past month after his diagnosis that I wasn’t sure if I had any tears left.

It was a grey January day and I was sitting on his bed as he laid there, watching me. I had been reading from the book I had given to him that Christmas. It was a book about symbols in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ temples. I had been excited for him to read it, but he would never hold the book in his strong, seemingly immortal hands.

The spine of the book was stiff and the pages stark white. I hardly heard the words that I had read aloud to him. Every word, once spoken, seemed to float about me and disappear like wisps of smoke. My mind skittered from thought to thought. Will he ever get better? Will we have a year like the doctor guessed? Will we have until the snow melts?

He was watching me intently with his sharp blue eyes. It was one of the rare days that he seemed present. The cancerous tumor in his brain had not yet devoured his mind completely. Little did I know, he would be gasping for his last breaths only two weeks later.

I had given him the book along with a hat I had knitted for his now-bald head. They had shaved it two weeks ago to drill into his skull to see if the tumor was operable. It wasn't.

I had given him the book because his whole life was built from books. He rose from a lowly clothes salesman in a department store to the manager in a brokerage firm. It was all because of his lifelong passion for attaining knowledge. His family never had the money to send him off to college. Never a college attendee, but always a student: my father built a flourishing life through books.

Every first Saturday of the month the local library in our hometown in Washington would have a used book sale in the parking lot. Long, plastic picnic tables were covered with books of all kinds. We would wander and then meet up with armfulls of books and excited smiles. In the car we would show each other our newly found treasures and chatter excitedly about which were our favorites. My collection of Nancy Drew books grew and grew. My dad's books were added to the many book shelves that were scattered about our house.

​Every birthday and Christmas I would paw through the piles of presents for the book shaped ones and sit them next to me. I'd save them for the end--best for last. When I ripped off the festive paper, there laid a book and a blossoming excitement in my belly. I would jump up and give my father the biggest hug, my face buried in his large chest. He hugged me back and I’d perch on his knee. “What you got there, Caitie bug?” He’d ask me.

Naturally, my father and I would find ourselves pulled into libraries, no matter where we traveled. We would walk the aisles in quiet reverence. My library cards have always taken the premium positions in my wallets. Libraries were the hub in my life and one of the biggest connections to my father.

After I had graduated Brigham Young University of Idaho, my parents moved to Rexburg. I was thrilled. I told my father about the Madison Library that I had frequented. We’d peruse the aisles together as we had done in many other libraries before. But he had become increasingly busy with new business ventures. And he was also becoming distant and strange. The tumor had begun to grow, unbeknownst to us.

After he died I would drive to the Madison library and sit in the parking lot and stare at the building that had once brought me so much joy. I could not bring myself to walk through those doors again. It seemed so empty without his gentle presence.

I sat, watching families go through the doors and leave with books in their arms. I would rub my swollen belly as my son kicked and bumped about as the heater rattled and blew dry, hot air into my face.

This was the library I had checked out, "Taking Charge of your Fertility" six years prior when my husband and I could not seem to conceive. This was the library that I had shuffled into, averting my gaze from the children's section and burrowed in the pages of my college assignments. This was the library I had participated in the summer reading program and relived my childhood excitement of summer reading after graduating from college--successfully forgetting my barren womb.

After eight years of my father comforting me in my infertility, he would not be there for the birth of my son. He would not be there to take him to the library as he had taken me.

I bore my son not two months after my father laid to rest. I stayed with my mother and trudged through the thick, choking fog of grief. My son, with sharp blue eyes like my father’s, was the light in my darkness.

But we could not stay in Rexburg any longer. I did not want to drive down the same road that I had followed the hearse that carried my father. We moved to California near my husband’s parents and I mended my broken heart as best I could.

When my son turned two I felt compelled to return to Rexburg. I fought the feeling. There were too many haunting memories of my father there. But my mother had a house we could rent, my husband had felt his own impression, and I wanted to be near my mother once again.

We had just moved a few days prior when I found myself sitting at a red light on Main Street. I was on my way to Broulims. My son had just turned three and he was happily playing in his carseat when I gazed down Center Street. Could I bring myself to go inside again? I asked myself.

When my son was just a baby, I had read him books that friends had gifted to us, but I had not read a book for myself. I had not stepped into a library since that fateful January day.

I missed the pages, the stories, the shelves of books, and friendly librarians.

I needed to get groceries--we had an empty fridge save a gallon of milk and some shriveled carrots in one of our clear refrigerator drawers. I turned right onto Center Street as if in a trance. I needed to see if I could walk back inside.

Slowly, I unbuckled my son and walked through the library doors.

I needed to get a new library card because my old one was packed away or lost--I didn't know. We successfully left the library with a bag filled with books for my son, but none for myself. Not yet.

Our next trip I had another bulging bag filled with books for my son. As we turned to leave, I passed a display of new young adult books on a shelf. Without thinking, I grabbed one and checked it out. When I returned home the book sat on the counter and waited. And waited. I would walk by and stare at it. With hands that trembled slightly, I would pick it up, sit on the couch and stare.

I renewed my loan three times before I returned the book, but never read a word. This happened six other times with six other books. Still, I had not read a single word.

My son, however, (an active boy that often ran up and down the stairs in our house to the rousing songs of Star Wars) would sit still for an hour if I was reading to him. "More stories!" He'd shout when I finished one.

He had not only inherited my father's eyes, but also his hunger for stories.

I, however, was haunted by books. Before coming back to Rexburg I had given away so many of my once-loved treasures. Now there were only two unopened moving boxes of books in our garage.

Then, one day, as we attended another story time, I passed a display on our way out of the library.

There was a sign that declared in cheerful letters "Library Bingo!" I paused. My son pulled my hand so he could push the handicapped button that magically opened the doors. “I want to push the button.” he said, pulling my hand harder. I grabbed the bingo page and stuffed it in the library bag, not knowing what it was, but eager to read it when I got home. We hurried home to make lunch.

​As I sat eating my homemade bean and cheese burrito, I opened the paper. A book bingo? I thought to myself. How clever.

Maybe I could read four books in a month. I used to read that many books--easy.

But….my stomach clenched and I put my food down, no longer in the mood to eat.

Maybe if I started reading something easy.. I thought cautiously. Something that would ease me back in...Yeah, I could do that.

So, I downloaded Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban audiobook onto my phone, popped in my earbuds, and began cleaning the kitchen. Sure, it was my umpteenth time reading/listening to it, but it was comfortable and safe. I could read this book. And if it was the only one I read, it was one more than I had read in four years.

Two weeks later, I presented my bingo page (with a successful bingo line drawn in blue marker) to the librarian at the counter. She smiled and brought out a small plastic container filled with little candies, coupons, and bookmarks. I took a bookmark with a hamburger on it and a coupon for a free ice cream cone at Burger King.

She could not have known the feeling of triumph that grew in my chest when she handed me that flimsy bookmark. Blushing at my seemingly juvenile excitement over trifles, I placed them into my purse and returned home.

After my son was asleep and my husband was watching TV, I drove to Burger King alone and ate my free ice cream cone in the parking lot. I opened Little Women and propped it on my lap and read, a slight smile on my face.

I wasn’t sure if any of the librarians believed that their Book Bingo meant anything to anyone. But it had done something for me. And on my following birthday, I was standing in line at Barnes & Noble with a pile of books that I was buying for myself. I felt an old joy bubble in my chest as I clutched them tightly. It was as if my father had given them to me himself.

I could almost hear him say, “What you got there, Caitie-bug?”