An essay I wrote about my Little Free Library is going to be published in an upcoming anthology of thoughts and recollections. I believe it will be coming out in the fall or early next year. Here is an excerpt from my essay:

A mother and her toddler were walking by my Little Free Library. The mom, pushing the stroller with an infant, slowed to look into the library, her little girl following behind. As the mother kept going, the little girl stopped in front of the library, too small to reach the library door by herself.

“I want a book,” she says. Her mother responds by calling her to catch up. The little girl, who was just over two, screamed “I want a book” and dissolved into tearful hysterics.

I thought to myself, “My work here is done.”  

I come from a family of book lovers and my brother and I have expanded that love of reading to a love of collecting books as well. So when I first came across the idea of the Little Free Library, I knew I needed to add a library annex to the collections piling up inside my home. I wanted a little library in order to share my love of books with everyone. Not to mention that it would be nice to have a repository for already read titles.

Since I set my little library free in the neighborhood, I have been surprised by the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response from my neighbors. From the day I put it up, I have been stopped by people I’ve never seen before to thank me for it. People often go out of their way to make a visit. There are even people who pull over while driving in order to take a peek.

But nothing has been as gratifying as the response from the kids in the neighborhood. For the first ten years that I lived here there was rarely a child to be seen, but in the last five years families have been having kids and families with kids have been moving in. The kids all love the Little Free Library. Nothing brings a smile to my face as the happy cry of a kid finding a book they want to read.
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This spring someone left a lovely gem of a book in my Little Free Library, The Queen Must Die: And Other Affairs of Bees and Men, by William Longgood. It looks like whomever left it never read it because the spine was still intact. Did they ever miss out on a delightful book. Longgood is a long-time amateur beekeeper and writes about his observations. Filled with facts and minutia about bee life and activities, it is a nature book. But with Longgood's wry observations and comparisons to other inhabitants of earth (without anthropomorphizing the bees), the book becomes a delight to read. I never knew how fascinating bees could be.