This is just what I needed to grit my teeth and respond, "I will be coming in someday when I get back to town. This is so nice".
During the next several years I spent many Saturday mornings in the library. How did I manage that? Farm kids learn to be inventive about getting their own way. I wanted to spend time in the library and read, read, read. There was so much to read in addition to that in our school library and I had completed reading everything in that library by grade five.
At age ten I saw my opportunity to get to the library on a regular basis. This was in relation to one of the routine farm tasks that took Pa to town at least once every two weeks. This was a half-day job. A wagon or sleigh would be loaded with grain in the morning, driven the five miles to Moore's feed mill and have it ground and mixed for feed for our hogs and cattle. Sometimes a sack of wheat was added to the load, it too was ground and used for our own breakfast cereal. When Pa drove the team to the mill in town he would wait about two hours for the task to be completed. He would spend these two hours visiting with Grandma and Grandpa and do any necessary shopping. Here was opportunity that I saw.
I had already driven to town by myself several times (see memoir WINTER WOOD) so I did not expect my age to be a deterrent and it wasn't. I volunteered to do the feed mill trek on Saturday mornings. The response was not automatic but the next day my parents said "Yes". My first date with a big library of over a thousand books was set.
My parents seemed pleased that I had volunteered for a time consuming job. They commented on how pleased Grandpa and Grandma would be when I stopped on Saturdays. It was then that I explained that I would be going to the library first and would go to Grandma's and Grandpa's if I had some extra time.
After some hesitation Ma said, "Perhaps you better go there first and change to some clean clothes. I'm sure the library people don't like farm kids in there to begin with".
There must have been some rebellion in my soul at that early age because I responded, "If they don't like it they will have to tell me. That will be time enough to go see Grandma and Grandpa. If I only read they may not kick me out."
I was never told to leave the library but at this early age and through age fifteen I learned what it was to be shunned. Of course I was the dirtiest looking person in the library. Loading and unloading sacks of grain left a mottled residue of dust on my jeans. No doubt my shoes did carry an aroma of cow shit left from the morning's milking, in retrospect, and to be honest I may have had my own body odor. Saturday night was bath night and this was Saturday morning.
During these special two hours on Saturday mornings, except when other pressing farm work interfered, I polluted the Howard Lake Public Library. Never did I see another farm kid in the library. And I read, first searching the stacks for books by authors I had read in the one-room school library (Curwood, London, Dickens, Grey, and others), then doing what I still do from time to time -- perusing the stacks for titles that appeal, even trying once or twice unsuccessfully to get the librarian to suggest something, and when that brought no result I took a book and read blindly, occasionally finding gems.
The last year I used this library was just after the repeal of prohibition and much of the library space was taken over by the new liquor store.
Do I remember those three libraries that formed a lifetime of reading? Yes I do, I thank my parents for that bookshelf built as part of the library table. I thank the one-room school board for five new books each year and a traveling library when it could be afforded. And I thank the Howard Lake Public Library for putting up with me even if it was against the accepted culture of the times.