It brought me close, in my musings, to my mother, and to our sojourns to the library. It was wonderful and it was bittersweet, because just as I was rediscovering those memories, my mother was losing all of hers. When I first told her that I was writing a book about libraries, she was delighted, and she said she was proud that she had a part in making me find them wondrous. But soon the dark fingers of dementia got her in their grip, and they pried loose random bits of her memory every day.
