I like words. As a young person, I always enjoyed looking up every word I encountered but didn’t know, and went on to read a page of the dictionary every day. It made my speech and expressions awkward in my formative years, at least until I learned to recognize the social and topical contexts for which the vocabulary was appropriate. It helped my test scores in reading and language, but with math, not so much.
I mention this because today’s column, “Sesquicentennial salubrity,” refers to anything conducive to health or well-being. It sounds like overindulgence on a graduation weekend, but it actually means anything that you enjoy or benefit from, and doesn’t harm others, I suppose. Moreover, it sounds like what we specialize at Gibson Memorial Library.
Our mission is to provide a welcoming place to meet and gather, offering staff skilled in providing access to the collection of materials and electronic resources to satisfy recreational and lifelong learning needs. That’s a mouthful – a veritable meatball of materials and services, but we strive to make the mix. To extend the culinary motif, at 6:30 p.m. Monday, June 24, don’t miss Minnesota extension educator and apron collector Sheila Craig. She’ll bring favorites from her apron assembly, and discuss their history, including aprons for men.
Many readers may associate aprons with a glass of wine. With wine on my mind, I think of Matilda’s annual wine walk. This year, there’s beer too, and it’s Friday, Aug. 2. It won’t be long before tickets are available at the library, and we look forward to seeing some new faces in the library as a result. We’ve grown fond of this event, and hope that it underlines our commitment to maintaining the vitality of Uptown Creston.
Meanwhile, keep your eyes on the prize! Our library board and capital campaign are working hard to build an addition to the Gibson Memorial Library that addresses some acute unmet needs in the community: space at the library for children’s programming, public meetings and our book’s and materials. The wine walk is an extension of that, and as you participate, we beckon you to imagine what a civic improvement it would be to have a comfortable, inviting and up-to-date library and cultural center anchoring Uptown Creston.
In the meantime, we’ll continue to partner with neighborhood churches to host our summer reading events. Tomorrow at 10 a.m. in the lower level of Holy Spirit Church, we welcome the Happy Faces of Kansas City, who’ll tell “Stories to the Stars and Back.” Our annual visit will be 10 a.m. Wednesday, June 26, from the Blank Park Zoo! We’re very lucky that this traveling exhibition of their animal kingdom continues to be available, and it’s a summer rite of passage for Creston area kids and their families. All our events are free and open to the public (with occasional age-group restrictions), and if you need assistance with a disability, call me at 641-782-2277.
We’re still hosting Lego-mania from 4 to 5 p.m. every other Thursday, and storytime at 10 a.m. every Friday through June and July. There’s still plenty of time to sign up for our summer reading program, which ends July 26, so make reading your summer avocation and you can claim a pair of I-Cubs tickets and a pass to Blank Park Zoo when you reach the summit.
And there’s one more thing. Well, two. On Wednesday, Aug. 21, Danny Steiber – the Barn Quilt Guy – will be at the library. We’ll keep you posted about that, and you won’t want to miss his presentation on the history of barn quilts. Did you know they’re linked with the Underground Railroad? In addition, historians Kathy Wilson and Linda McCann will return to the library in September and October, respectively.
Well, that’s enough for now, but I’ll leave you with a Matilda mini-milestone. Last week, our Facebook page achieved 1,000 “likes.” If you are a Facebook user, and if you haven’t already, please visit our page and give us a “like.” You see programming posts, and be the first to see our “Fifty Years Ago” posts. Matilda personally selects those clippings from her newspaper microfilm collection, and with the Sesquicentennial celebrations underway, she thinks they are timely and, well, downright salubrious for the public memory.