Margaret was a librarian for forty-one years, most of them in a small branch library in her neighborhood, the kind of building with mismatched chairs and a children's section painted by a local artist who later became famous. She knew her patrons by name and by reading habit. She knew which novels they had checked out the year their husbands died, and which ones they returned to in the spring. She did not expect, at sixty-three, to become the subject of her own quiet narrative.
The diagnosis came not long after she retired. She had imagined a different first year — the garden, the grandchildren, a small writing project she had been carrying in her head for a decade. Instead she learned a new vocabulary, a new schedule, a new geography of waiting rooms. She is still, she will tell you, a little angry about the timing.
But she is a librarian, which means she is, at her core, a person who believes in finding the right book for the right person at the right moment. She started keeping a list of what she was reading through treatment — novels, mostly, a few essays, the occasional memoir she could only take in small doses. She shared the list with a friend, who shared it with a friend, and now there is a small reading group at the cancer center she attends, and she is the one who runs it.
Margaret says a library is a place where people come to find themselves, and a patient circle, it turns out, is not so different. Different shelves. Same purpose. She is writing the small project after all, in the mornings, before the day gets loud. She is in no hurry to finish it.
