The Library Branch on Coldwater Road

The branch on Coldwater Road isn’t the biggest library in Fort Wayne, isn’t even the closest one to my apartment if I’m being strict about it, but it’s where I’ve had a card since I moved into this part of town and at some point loyalty to a specific building just becomes its own kind of habit, hard to justify past the fact that it’s mine now. Most of what my book club reads gets requested through that branch specifically, even when a closer location technically has the same copy sitting on a shelf.

There are two women who work the request desk there, and I don’t know either of their full names, which feels like a small failure on my part after however many years of showing up, but I know their faces and they know my hold list well enough that one of them flagged a mistake in it for me a few months back before I’d even noticed it myself, a duplicate request for a book I’d apparently already picked up and returned without updating anything. That’s the kind of small competence you don’t appreciate until someone points out you’d have wasted a hold slot on a book you’d already read.

Core of the Sun came from that branch, the actual physical copy, the cover with the woman cradling the chili pepper that’s what got me to pull it off the shelf in the first place rather than requesting it sight unseen off a list. I think about that a fair amount, actually, how much of what I’ve ended up reading in the last few years traces back to physically standing in front of a specific shelf at a specific branch rather than algorithmically arriving at a recommendation from somewhere online. The branch’s new arrivals section is small, maybe forty books at a time, and I’ve built an entire reading habit partly around whatever happens to be sitting in that particular forty book rotation on the days I show up.

I don’t have a grand point to make about libraries in general, other people have written that essay better than I would. I mostly wanted to write down the specific version of it that’s mine, one branch, two women at a desk who know my hold list, a rotating shelf of new arrivals that’s shaped more of my reading than I probably give it credit for out loud.

Book club’s picking the next read this coming first Tuesday. I already know I’ll end up at Coldwater Road before the week’s out, whatever gets chosen, because at this point going anywhere else to get it would feel like cheating on something I didn’t know I’d committed to.