Thanks, Granny Meg

We have been outside for the past two weeks enjoying the sunshine and splashing in water, planting flowers and pulling weeds, sliding and swinging and eating ice-cream. We love Summer time and we love the library, especially in the summer. One day, as my children and I made ourselves at home in the children's section of our local public library, one older man noticed us and ask me, "Did you enjoy the library as a child?" I smiled and couldn't resist sharing a few library memories. I remember, as a child, going to summer storytime at the library around the corner from our house. Meg Stauffer, loved and known by all the children in my hometown as Granny Meg, was the storytime lady for decades.

Recently, I recall reading a notice in the paper that Granny Meg was celebrating her 90th birthday and as far as I know still reading books to little children. Granny Meg is one of those people who leaves a lasting impression on everyone she comes in contact with and has touched the lives of countless children who attended storytime at our little library. As a very young child, I remember a creaking old one-room school house that held our town library. We sat in the basement on little rugs and listened intently to Granny Meg's story-telling.

A few years later, the old library was moved to make way for a new library. My sister, brother, the boy next door and I spent many hours in a flooded soon-to-be parking lot, fishing out tadpoles. We walked home with a stack of books in one arm and a jar of pollywogs in the other. When we were too old for storytime, we spent one summer mastering our stilt-walking skills on a few pairs of rugged home-made stilts my dad had put together for us. I remember walking around on those two and three-foot-high stilts when the Ringling Brothers and Barnum-Bailey Circus made its yearly animal walk past our street to the Coliseum a few miles away. We were pretty proud of our skills. Granny Meg recognized our enthusiasm and asked us to demonstrate our stilt-walking for the little kids at storytime.

I started to take an interest in poetry in my early teenage years and spent many hours up a tree in front of our house pouring over library copies of Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Longfellow. It was the words that I loved. In 1993, when my twin sister and I were preparing to graduate from high school, two packages arrived for us. We opened them to find a simple, yet lovingly-made ceramic nativity in each box and a little note from Granny Meg. She remembered...She remembered us all. We weren't the only storytime children Granny Meg remembered. I have other storytime friends who proudly display a Granny Meg nativity every year at Christmas.... Just as I still do. Thank you, Granny Meg. My children love the library too.