Diary of a Little Free Librarian, entry one

2026-07-282026-07-28 / mlouisehill / Leave a comment

I always wanted to be a librarian. Long before I considered getting a Ph.D. so I could teach at the university level, I applied to library school. Then I applied again after I had that Ph.D. and a tenure-track teaching job in a small college in Buffalo. I was thinking this university teaching wasn’t for me.

Both times I applied, I was accepted. The reason I never followed through on library school was because I couldn’t afford it. During the 1980’s and 1990’s, it was easier to get an assistantship to pay for an M.A. in Creative Writing (Syracuse University) and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies (New York University) than it was to get financial aid for library school. An M.L.S. would cost me cash, and I didn’t have it. I had attained my goal of becoming a university professor, and I was broke all the time. That fact in and of itself deserves a blog entry about why the U.S.A. ended up with so many extremely educated coffee baristas. But I digress. This is an entry about how I’ve finally attained my dream job. Librarian. Don’t be deceived, this credential wasn’t earned freely. It only cost $400.00.

This is my Little Free Library, installed June 13, 2026.

When we installed it our city strip on Buffalo’s West Side, I wasn’t quite sure where to go with it. My husband and I have tons of books, and we think it’s about time to part with many of them. But would the reading material of the previous chapters of our lives appeal to our neighbors? I had a vague sense this little library needed to be curated. But how? What did my audience want to read?

My initial offerings were a stab in the dark. Like many lifetime readers, I don’t know where to begin when it comes to shedding my library. I love my books dearly. Each represents a stage in my life. So, I put out a few volumes of AGNI that I knew I wouldn’t be reading again, and a Pam Johnson-Bennett’s Starting From Scratch: How To Correct Behavioral Problems in Your Adult Cat. I was certain someone would take the cat book. I knew that AGNI was a long shot, but I thought I’d try. Otherwise, I feared I’d have to throw them out.

I sat on my second floor porch and watched, camouflaged by the netting we’d put up to create a cat. Would anyone notice my library? Would anyone stop to browse?

Neighbors out for their evening stroll didn’t notice it at all. Nor did their dogs. Or their children.

Children. I wanted children to look in my library. But what did I have to offer them?

Scanning my children’s books collection, I realized that those that I’ve kept are very dear to me. Doctor Seuss’ Sleep Book and Stormy, Misty’s Foul are stories I once knew by heart. I’m not ready to give them away. Though I never had children, my stepson has two girls, and I have nephews. Who knows? They might want these books. And then I found a book that I’d acquired in a Ten Thousand Villages gift basket I won in a raffle. Mama Panya’s Pancakes: A Village Tale From Kenya. A sweet story, but I wasn’t attached to it. I put it in the Little Free Library, hoping a neighbor child would want it. I also found two coloring books I’d bought a few years ago for the granddaughters. Now young teenagers, they’re not interested in coloring.

For a couple days, no one even seemed to open the Library door. And then one evening, my husband and I were eating dinner al fresco, out on our second floor porch, when a neighbor and his son walked, very deliberately, from their house two doors away straight to our Little Free Library. They looked at Mama Panya’s Pancakes. They put it back. Then the neighbor said “Look, here’s some coloring books. Do you want them?”

The child shook his head and ran away.

The next morning, the coloring books were gone. And so was one AGNI.

My vision of my immediate community began to take shape. I went to a nearby Family Dollar and bought three more coloring books, as well as a two adult word search books. At the most, they cost $2.00. I figured I could leave one of each out each week.

Within twenty-four hours, they both were gone. As was Mama Panya’s Pancakes. But AGNI remained, as did Starting From Scratch. I found it hard to believe no one wanted the cat book, and, well, I have a lot of old issues of AGNI. If I could find someone interested in contemporary literature, I’d be happy to give more away. If only I could . . .

By June 24, I’d begun to scan my books regularly, looking for something I no longer wanted. Like The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, a 2009 Oprah’s pick by David Wroblewski. I’d enjoyed this retelling of Hamlet set in rural Wisconsin when I read it. But I didn’t think I’d read it again. Now armed with the criteria “Loved It But Wouldn’t Read Again,” the picking got easier. Over the past couple years, I’ve been reading voraciously. Some of the titles I’ve read were books I thought might be good “comp titles” for my own novel. I listened to Mary-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland before I read the book, and enjoyed it in both forms. I found much to love in Rachel Khong’s multi-generational family saga in Real Americans. My husband liked it too. But we both were happy to give someone else the pleasure of reading them. So out they went. Other titles, like Laura Venita Green’s Sister Creatures were published by independent presses I thought I might query. I enjoyed Sister Creatures‘ creepiness, and I did indeed query Unnamed Press around the same time I queried Accents Publishing, which will be publishing my novel.

I was spying on my Little Free Library on the day a bookish-looking young woman stopped and snagged Beautyland and Real Americans. I was elated when she slipped them into her backpack. I hoped she’d share Beautyland with a friend after she finished it, as I did, and then have a lively discussion about whether or not the protagonist was really an alien, or simply mad.

By June 24th, I was adding books that I had doubles of: like T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Jellicle Cats and Gabriel Garcia’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude. And an amazing thing happened: The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters appeared out of nowhere!

Receiving a book from an anonymous donor raised an ethical question for me: Did that bookish young woman give me The Berry Pickers in exchange for the books she’d taken? Did she think I’d like it? Was I obliged to read it? I took it out of the box and researched it. Google books describes it this way:

“July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come. In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret. Peters presents a novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.”–“

IIt was as if the donor realized that I, too, had written a book about family secrets. I added it to my pile of must reads. I even started to read it. Twice. But each time I did, the other books on the pile next to my bed beckoned. The ones I had chosen myself. Ultimately, I decided to let someone else read The Berry Pickers, and if they returned it, I’d try it. (It actually was taken once and returned before disappearing again, that time for good.)

I was delighted when One Hundred Years of Solitude disappeared, within a couple days. I have several copies of it, and I’ve taught the book twice – once while I was teaching in Türkiye, and once after I returned to America. It’s among my ten desert island picks. Garcia-Marquez’s influence on my own writing is profound. When One Hundred Years of Solitude disappeared so quickly, my interest peaked. Who was taking my books? I wanted to meet them.

It was about this time that I decided I was the only person in the neighborhood with a naughty cat. No one wanted Starting From Scratch. It was time to take it out. Maybe put it back later. I also removed Blind Spot in America, one of several Red Hen Press books that I bought before I queried them. I wish I had liked Blind Spot more. I had hoped someone in my neighborhood would be intrigued, but it sat for ten days before it and Starting From Scratch were tossed into a bag for the local U.U. church’s annual used book sale.

My project to shed anything we wouldn’t use anymore moved into the huge collection of arts and crafts supplies I kept for kids who visited us. We have tons of crayons. More than three 64 color boxes of Crayolas. We could spare a few. I put out a coloring books with a bag of four crayons stapled to it. They were gone within a day, as was the sticker I put next to it. It was at that point I discovered Amazon sold coloring books bulk; I ordered a collection of 25 for $17.00. I’ve been putting them one or two out every week, and I’ve included four crayons with each one.

One day, returning home from running errands, I encountered a man thumbing through my collection. He said hello. He was tall and lanky, with thick glasses and wispy blond hair. He picked up the remaining issue of AGNI. “This is from Boston University, isn’t it?” he asked, and I nodded. “I used to live in Boston,” he said, “and I do love short stories. I’ll see how these are.” We chatted a bit about literature and the neighborhood before he thanked me and walked away.

I don’t know when Edgar Sawtelle disappeared, but it did. As did several other titles. Clearly, I had some neighbors who liked to read. Fantasy was a favorite – I realized that the day several volumes of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novel appeared. I’d learned about Sandman from one of my former students. I’d read a few of them and liked them. I considered taking them myself, but then they disappeared. A few days later, they returned. Again, I found myself contemplating taking them and sending them to my nephews. I was certain they’d like them.

My husband was trimming the bushes in front of our house the day a young African-American man came hurrying down the sidewalk. He made a beeline to my Little Free Library. “Can I help you?” my husband said. “I came for the Neil Gaiman,” he replied. He gathered them all and hurried away.

Clearly, my Little Free Library was gaining a following, and it looked like people were using it to share books. I saw that happen again when I discovered five of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books piled inside of it. Four were paperbacks, and one a hardback, and all were huge! They took up all the space in my extremely little Little Free Library. The only other thing I could fit in were coloring books. On July 27, I decided to take four of Martin books out and leave a note explaining what I’d done. My note said: “Dear Readers, Welcome! Thanks for stopping by. . . .

I left a stub of a red pencil beside my note. The next day, I found both the coloring books and Game of Thrones gone, and two different messages added to my note:

Over the next few days, I got rid of all five Game of Thrones books, one at a time, and I began adding more of my own books. I was now beginning to evaluate books I’ve been carrying around for decades. I have quite a collection of fantasy and science fiction that I enjoyed in my early 20’s. I was a terrific fan of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and I bought each sequel as it appeared. I’d love to read them again to figure out why I liked them so much. But I’m also willing to get rid of them. I also have a small collection of non-fiction about popular culture from my undergraduate years as an English major at Cleveland State University in the late 1970’s. One of my favorite instructors taught courses on popular culture and media. The first book I offered up to my current reading public was Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock n’ Roll. That book disappeared overnight, and a new note was added to my card:

Could it be that my Little Free Library was actually becoming a destination? The Griel Marcus note was dated July 25th. On the 26th, a copy of the Bible appeared, to complement a previous donation by my across-the-street neighbor – Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination and my extra copy of John Irving’s Cider House Rules. The Bible is another desert island pick for me, and I’m not ready to give up my own, so the donated Bible is still waiting for someone who needs it. I also added Being Human, an anthology of classic humanist readings which I’d considered as a possible textbook for a writing course a year or two before I retired. And I began dipping into my vast collection of theatrical play-texts.

About six months ago, I was delighted to find the hard copy edition of Percival Everett’s 2024 best-seller James in someone else’s Little Free Library. I’d been wanting to read it, so I grabbed it. Both my husband and I enjoyed it, but we didn’t need to keep it. Tonight we decided to put it back into circulation. It”s out there tonight, waiting for the next person whose heart will skip a beat when they spy it through the window of my Little Free Library.

Blame it on Copernicus

2023-01-152023-12-04 / mlouisehill / 2 Comments

I watch the BBC Global News every night, and more and more, I’m thinking about Copernicus.

Nikolai Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (English translation: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), in 1543. And the collective human mind, so to speak, wasn’t happy. Before Copernicus, the general public thought of the earth as being the center of everything. The sun turned around our planet, as did the moon. We were the center of it all. So the idea of making earth peripheral to the sun was radical. Forty-one years later, Giordano Bruno expanded Copernicus’ model, arguing that the stars we see in the night sky are other suns, with planets revolving around them. He was executed as a heretic in 1600. Galileo published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1632 “with formal authorization from the Inquisition and papal permission.” Still, he died in 1642 under house arrest for heresy.

During the tumultuous century or so between Copernicus’ model and a universal acceptance of it, the collective human mind convulsed from the trauma of discovering how subordinate we really were, in relation to space and time. The change of consciousness this incited had to be universally accepted by all humans before we could proceed to evolve. This type of perceptual change is commonly called a Paradigmatic Shift. Graduate students and college professors joke about paradigmatic shifts all the time over a beer, but I’m currently not laughing. I’d say we’re having one.

Thanks to the James Webb Space Scope and the emergence of global social media, people all around the world are currently being forced to change their perceptions of time and space in two different ways. First, and most significantly: with each new image from outer space, our planet and our solar system shrinks. That Sun In The Middle Of Eight Planets Solar System Carnival Ride-Like Celestial Model is no longer valid. Hell, we’re watching stars exploding.

from The Guardian 9 January 2023

Simultaneously, we’re able to watch global news as it happens: Russia, destroying the Ukraine as it tries to reclaim former empirical cities; national and world leaders acting like five year old boys on the playground. There’s social upheaval in Iran. In the U.S.A., we’re bickering over identity. Gender identity. Individual identity. National identity. Regional Identity. Social identity. Political identity. We’re hanging on a thread between Democracy or Autocracy, as Jonathon Capehart has said. As if anyone cares anymore. On some level, everyone realizes that thinking about Earth as separate states, nations, even continents, is not viable anymore.

The transition we’re going through, whether we like it or not, asks us to give up our national and local differences and begin acknowledging that we’re global citizens, and tending the earth is are most important task right now. We’re all going through torment right now, because our earth is suffering. She’s been traumatized. Or is it menopause? We alone have the power to revive her. Earth can still nurture us, if we nurture it. If we want our children and grandchildren to enjoy our beautiful home, we’re all responsible for our planet’s survival.

Based on the last time humanity shifted paradigmatically, it could take a century for humanity to make this intellectual transition. With all the wars and bickering that we’re doing, I wonder if we have that much time left?

Wikipedia, “Nicolaus Copernicus

Honoring D-Day, and my Dad.

2022-06-082023-08-27 / mlouisehill / 2 Comments

So, Monday, June 6, was D-Day: the anniversary of the Normandy landings in 1944. I didn’t realize it until late in the day. Today, to honor it, I watched the address Eisenhower delivered to the men. Listen to it.

Looking at the faces of these enlisted men in the audience, I see my young father.

My parents – maybe yours, too- spent their adolescence witnessing unfolding reports about the second world war in much the same way we are today experiencing Russia’s assault on the Ukraine. In the 1930’s, as images of destruction and genocide became commonplace, the majority agreed that Hitler and Stalin’s facism was evil. My father’s generation was sent to save us.

Drafted in 1944, my dad did not see any actual battle. He was shipped out in peacetime as a military police officer. Stationed in Southern France, he was issued a motorcycle. His patriotism grew as the liberated world welcomed him. He was adored. He learned French quickly, because of Latin skills learned at a Jesuit high school and contemplations of priesthood. By the time he returned, he was fluent in French, and no longer confident in his vocation. He started college on the GI Bill before he married. He tried to earn his language credits by taking French backwards – French 4 freshman year; French 3 sophomore year; French 2 junior year; French 1 senior year. They caught up with him in the senior year, made him take another year of language. German. He struggled with it.

No matter, he had reason to be cocky. He was a member of The Greatest Generation.

^{A page out of dad’s World War II photo album – the only photo album he ever kept.}

Facism’s face is rising again. Genocide is happening in real time, and we have been asked to witness it. It’s happened before: either by choice or force, charismatic dictators have taken over when democratic government appeared to be falling apart.

This past Monday was D-Day. How did you acknowledge it?

Happy Birthday, Mom.

2022-02-13 / mlouisehill / Leave a comment

The older I get, the more I believe that eternity and memory exist in the same domain. What we remember remains eternal, as long as the capacity for memory lasts.

The internet and social media have become storage places for memory. The permanence it offers punctures the restrictions of a single human life. Once something is posted, it remains eternally. Imagine this blog, if you will, as a dot on a radio wave, arcing through the heavens at this moment, to remain there in an eternal loop long after this planet is gone.

I feel a great compulsion to remember forgotten people by writing about them, in one form or another, in order to give them their own little star in the constellation of universal memory.

So on this day, February 12, 2022, I remember my Mom, Katie, who shared her birthday with Abraham Lincoln. The last time I saw her, on her birthday, 2020, her Lewy Body Dementia was fairly advanced. She was prone to hallucinations and to saying exactly what she was thinking. During that birthday visit, I told one of her caregivers it was Katie’s birthday, adding: “Mom shares a birthday with Abraham Lincoln!” (The caregiver was young enough to not know February 12 was Lincoln’s birthday.) Mom’s immediate reply:”Yeah, Abe Lincoln. Lucky him!”

The caregiver said, in her sweetest voice: “why is Abe Lincoln lucky Katie?”

Mom’s reply: “He’s dead!”

_{Katie and Me, February 7 (five days before her birthday) 2020}

Now, there are a few things I know about my Mom, and one of them is that she would hate that picture of her and me . Yeah, she looked pretty good for 92, but if she had her way, she would have never ended up old and demented. She liked looking pretty. She felt she owed it to whomever she encountered to look her best.

I suspect most people have a favorite age – an age when we felt most comfortable in our own skin. I liked my 30’s and 40’s. But I’m also quite content with now. For others, like Katie, it was their 20’s: the years when she worked, met my dad, and had her first two children. (She was happy with her other children, too, for sure. Unfortunately, I suspect things were dicey with my dad then. Though we would have never guessed it at the time, this also became apparent in the last year of her life, when, in her hallucinations, she yelled at him and complained about him.)

_{Mary Kathleen, graduating from St. Stephen’s High School, Cleveland, around 1945.}

A significant difference between Lewy Body Dementia and other dementias is the hallucinations. While she was still at home, Mom was constantly seeing something on the roof of the neighbor’s house. Sometimes it was a man, just standing there. Sometimes he was mowing the lawn. Climbing a tree. Lighting a fire. The nights I stayed with her, I experienced her night hallucinations. She saw ghosts. They were often behind me. When I asked her to describe them, she told me they were making faces at me. The most common ghost was her mother, Christiana Thompson.

Now, this didn’t surprise me too much. A psychic once told me that my maternal grandmother was my guardian angel. I believed her, because I needed an angel like her.

When she appeared in my mom’s hallucinations, Christiana (Chris) probably looked like this.

Being married to an Irishman named Gus, Christiana became Chris.

Katie adored Gus. In the last months of her life, she told me he was with her all the time.

During those transitional months, I read Dr. Christopher Kerr‘s book Death Is But a Dream. As the Chief Executive Officer of Buffalo’s Hospice and Palliative Care center, Kerr and his team specialize in ELE’s – End of Life Experiences. In this book, Kerr walks a fragile line between pragmatism and and spirituality. Everyone, he reports, hallucinates as they approach death. Even the most tormented individuals end their lives in peace, accompanied by vivid hallucinations of those who loved them most.

Like my mother did. As she lingered at death’s door, Gus never left her side. Her mother Chris was there beckoning, as was her baby brother Jim, who preceded her by three months. Her sister Rose Marie probably greeted her with some comment like “what took ya so long?” Three months after Katie, her sister, my namesake Aunt Mary Lou, followed.

Considering the way my mom talked to me at the end of her life, I believe that in her near-death dreams, she saw herself as young again. (I asked her once how old she was. Her response: “well, I’m younger than you! Look at you! How did you get so old?”) Young, too, were her parents. Her brother. Her sister. Her lifelong best friend, Jeannie. Ultimately, my father. She had trouble with her memories of my father, but he was there in the end, too.

I have the photo album Katie kept, when she was in her late teens/early twenties. It was preserved well, and she meticulously labeled each photo. She looked at it often as she grew older, to remember who she was when she was happiest.

Today, as I look at it, I let myself believe that this is how my mother looks in her afterlife. Happy Birthday, Mom.