library – Catching Marbles

Wilton is neither super close nor terribly far from where I live but it does have one key difference that I needed on this particular outing – it has a lot of Free Little Libraries and if I was to continue my tour donating signed copies of my book for people to find this seemed like a great place to start.

I thought this would be super easy. I’d just choose a town or city I was already in, look at the Little Free Library App, share the addresses with my GPS and voila! It’d be quick, efficient, and a little fun. This has not been my experience… if anything this has been more like a treasure hunt than an easy chore list. Sometimes I drive right up to them, sometimes I drive right up to absolutely nothing at all, sometimes I find the abandoned shells of a lost dream. As such it took me THREE separate trips to Wilton to get most, not all, of the little libraries.

Marden Road – Abandoned

The first one I stopped at was on Marden Road and it sounded really sweet. It was in the middle of nowhere aside a horse pasture and on the app it said it was dedicated to a recently deceased horse who I guess the local children would frequently visit- when it was still alive of course. Despite being on a farm road with very few houses or anything of note I managed to find it partially up a long driveway. Drove right to it. But there was something wrong. It was made from an old cubby freezer and it looked thoroughly abandoned. There was a sun-bleached spot where a sign must have once stuck to it. Inside there were no books – just spider webs, leaves, and debris. This made me so sad! I had the perfect farm related book to leave in it if it was running but alas no.. I reported it as defunct to the Free Little Library Website.

65 Main Street

I thought finding something on Main Street would be super easy so I headed to this one next. I knew it was in a park. I drove by but my GPS claimed it was on the opposite side of the road than it was so not only did I not see a little library I didn’t even see the park! At this point I decided to find a place to turn around – ended completely distracted when I drove into the parking lot of the Riverview Mill Artist Studios. Luckily there was a sweet woman there that set me straight. There is indeed a park, a very little park, squished in between a chocolatier and a cupcake shop, and within that tiny park there’s a gorgeous natural rock fountain, a view of the train bridge, some benches shaded by trees, and a very elegant Little Free Library built to look like the surrounding buildings. In short I found Heaven – a tiny peaceful spot to read or people watch while munching on chocolates and freshly baked cupcakes. Wilton, you have it made.

10 Livermore Street

Of all the Little Libraries I have visited this one really stands out. It’s sitting directly across from an elementary school so I was figuring it was going to be this hokey little children’s book cabinet. And there’s nothing wrong with that… but I drove up to it I was just delighted to see it. Blazoned loudly on it’s side was a trans flag (with a black and brown stripe included) and its front was wrapped in pride flag colors. A little gnome stood guard. I grew up in a small town nearby that really didn’t appreciate me or my unflinching gender fuckery so to see such loud and positive queer rep, especially for trans and trans kids of color, made my heart just fucking MELT. I was already won with this but it got better. As I stood there taking photos a polite tabby gentleman ambled up and practically said, “Can I haz all the pats pleez?” This cat was AWSOME. Obviously, I obliged. Seriously could have lost the rest of the day petting him. I knew this library was geared towards elementary students but some of the books looked like they were for middle-aged or young adults so I felt comfortable leaving a copy of Achilles in Heels there. It’s an updated retelling of an old Greek myth. Basically, I wrote about the teenage years of Achilles where he was forced by his mother to hide from the draft by pretending to be a princess. He also finds himself in a polyamorous vee with his two best friends Patroclus and Deidamia. So, there’s a lot of positive queer rep and it’s “sweet” (no sex scenes) so even though it was about teenagers and not smaller children I left it there. It just felt right to leave it there chilling next to a few other young adult type books. This library really made my day. I still smile thinking about it. So, whoever it tending to it – keep doing good work. Your library is absolutely wonderful and it means a lot. Also please pat the cat for me. And give him a treat if possible.

7 Forest Road

There’s supposed to be a Little Free Library on the playground here. I didn’t find it and to be honest I didn’t try that hard as my books aren’t children’s books and loitering around a playground when I don’t have any kids in tow is creepy at best. But if I am to believe the photo on the Free Little Library app it is adorable…

24 Maple Street

Honestly, I don’t know how I ended up here. I was looking for something else, I think the little library at the Methodist Church on North River Road which I drove past and then while I was trying to find my way back home I ended up turning on Maple Street and boom! I was in front of a little library! Mistaking it for the one I was looking for I fudged up the label saying where I left it and then when I got home to check if it matched the address and photo on the app I found out it didn’t match anything at all. It did have a chapter number but that came up unregistered. I seriously lost an hour trying to figure this out when I suddenly remembered there was an adorable bantam rooster crowing in the background and a sign reading Maple something Farm. From here I had to consult Google street view and prove to myself I had not toppled into the Twilight Zone earlier. This is what happens when you have ADD brain and you let it go hog wild. It makes tracing your steps earlier in the day almost impossible! Rest assured I am fine and this little library is delightful. And apparently new because it wasn’t on Google Street View. SIIIIIIGGGGGHHH.

195 Isaac Frye Hwy

Finally, we come to a library that’s not in town but rather out in the puckers again – well, sort of. It’s actually in the parking lot of a popular cafe. A cafe that was so popular that you need reservations just to eat there. It’s because it was so busy on that morning that I was focused too hard on pedestrians and traffic to even notice the little library and had to find it on Google Street View that night before returning on a different day! It’s a unique and cute one too! I deposited a book there and was well on my way.

As of late I have been sitting here surrounded by boxes of books – books I had written, published, and bought in the hopes of selling. Here’s the thing though – for as good as I am at writing books I have no marketing skills AT ALL. I could sit here and wallow in my own ineptitude ooooor I could get up, dust myself off, and try something new. So that’s what I am doing.

I have registered a number of all three of my books with Book Crossing which is a free book tracking website where you can register a book, leave it somewhere, and hope that someone picks it up, reads it, and lets you know where it ended up before leaving it somewhere else for someone else. It’s like those old Follow the Dollar Bill games. And where am I going to leave my books? Why not at little free libraries all across New England? Hit two birds with one stone – get my books out there and have something to blog about!

So I started in my hometown of Rindge with my latest book and only work of fiction to date Achilles in Heels. I signed this copy as well as designing the label in it asking for it to be passed around. And that’s when I discovered that this tiny little town has it’s own little free library on LaChance Drive in Rindge. So that’s where I left it cuddled up to a ton of dime store romances. And that’s where my tour of little free libraries is going to start! In upcoming blog entries I will try to do whole towns/cities that have more than one to choose from!

If libraries full of books weren’t enough for us we decided that a library of dead things might round out the day. That’s basically what the Edna Nature Lab is. It’s a large collection of bones and specimens that are there for easy study by the students at the Rhode Island School of Design. And if you follow this blog you might remember not too long ago I was at the RISD poking at their puppet museum. Clearly this is a school for… strange people. And that’s what so amazing about it!

Now when we arrived the door was locked. This was clearly some sort of college building used for different things so we were kind of out of luck until a gaggle of students walked in and we… just followed them. Sorry security! We promise not to do anything bad!

The lab was great. It was a giant room full of bones, taxidermy, insect specimens, you name it. There was even a few cages and tanks with live baby sea horses and a veeeery old and depressed looking degu. Maybe it survived the rest of the colony, I don’t know. My companion had never seen one before and thought he was cute. I… once had one of them escape my breeding colony that I had a teenager and unbeknownst to me it ended up living feral in my lawn until my pit bull was found throwing its carcass violently into the air like a toy. It was a bit of a startling sight to see a Chilean rodent being dug up by your dog in your very American lawn… Such is my life.

But back to the lab! It reminded me of something a Victorian “naturist” would have set up. I was very keen on the bones and bug specimens but there was also a lot of really spectacular taxidermy… and one baby dik dik that looked fucked up. I guess you need one piece of bad taxidermy to make the rest look all the better, I don’t know. Anyway, it was a short visit but none the less super interesting and we left before being removed by security. So that’s always good.

As we left I also noticed they seemed to have a bunch of marine tanks in the basement I could see through a window. Some with little cuttlefish in them and that just made my heart soar a bit. So cute. Remember when we all though marine biologist was like the go to job in the adult world? Those were the days…

Onward we walked to the nearby gun totem!

So after the John Hayes Library we decided to keep on walking to “The Ath” as the locals call it. It’s another library but with its own unique charm. Apparently, it was in this library where Edgar Allen Poe had his marriage proposal turned down and H P Lovecraft also wrote about it in his many letters to friends. He seemed to have a great affection for it and I could see why.

Upon stepping in there’s a little room to the side you’re guided into and there was a woman at a desk handing out visitor stickers and politely saying that there was a suggested $5 per person donation but that it wasn’t required. I was already endeared to this place so whatever. Spending $5 here was a lot better than the $5 that the parking meter ate (no, I still haven’t forgotten about that.) In return for our most gracious donation, we were handed a little guide and told we could do a self-tour.

This place was kind of adorable. I was digging the whole vibe with the historic figure busts around the ceiling, the Roman statue at the entrance, and in the center of it all the bane of my childhood existence – A card catalogue. Today’s youth will never know the pain of having to search for “key words” manually by hand, flipping through index card after index card only to end up absolutely nowhere because guess what? The key words in your brain will NEVER match the keywords of the insufferable clerk that put this hellfire together. Made me a little nostalgic.

The guide was fun, we walked about looking at different things it was talking about and just generally digging the place. The downstairs had a distinct speak easy feel about it and this place did say it held a lot of cultural events so who knows! We then wandered accidentally into the rare volumes room and were quickly shuffled out by a very intense academic whose energy was let’s just say tightly wound. VERY tightly wound. The door we walked through was supposed to be locked. We held up our hands, swore we didn’t touch anything, and tried to back out in the friendliest way possible. I sighed, spending a day out in this college town was a bit of a mindfuck for me. It was the kind of place I always daydreamed about as a kid when I still had aspirations. I wonder if I had not had a total likely autistic burnout in nineth grade if I would have ended up somewhere like here… being someone like that guy, hidden by academia because the world is really too much, swatting at people getting too close to my drawers full of bones (as I would have studied paleontology not literature.) Life has not been easy or straight forward for me but I like who I am now and I’m actually grateful that I have come this far. I certainly enjoy life more.

And with that epiphany we decided to continue our journey to the Edna Biology Lab.

Tag: library

Five Little Free Libraries – Wilton NH

Little Free Library – Rindge NH

The Edna Nature Lab – Providence RI

The Athenaeum – Providence RI