To the Editor:
We wanted to take a moment to express our heartfelt gratitude for the beautiful space that our Colusa County Library has held through so many chapters of life.
As grade school kids, we remember growing up and walking through those doors and feeling like new worlds of possibility opened up every time. It was a happy place. Those shelves held magic between worn pages and brand-new ones. I remember spending entire summers with a Beverly Cleary classic or a Baby-Sitters Club book in hand. One summer was spent teaching myself the sign language alphabet, just because. It was so fun to be curious and to come back over and over to grab a new book and start a new journey.
Later in life, when we returned to Colusa with two young kids of our own, the library became part of our family’s rhythm all over again. Storytime and summer programs kept learning fun and free for our kids and our family. We enjoyed taking the kids in just to enjoy a moment of levity drawing or gluing something fun with the art project of the week.
Today, we notice something else. The library holds every stage of life at once, all under one roof. Kids learning the love of books through a Saturday morning or evening family program. Folks from our senior community bent over old newspaper archives, tracing some piece of local history. We have even enjoyed planting something new from Laura Leidner’s seed library, and gathering with the Lifelong Readers book club, where voices from so many different backgrounds and generations come together around the same story.
We have heard the term “third place” used for spots like this, somewhere that is not home and not work, where you can simply show up as you are. That is what the library has been for our family. Free of charge, open to anyone, a place to learn and connect with our community.
We hope our community continues to see it as the treasure it is.
With gratitude,
Marissa and Adam Dragoo
Colusa, CA