Dipping Into A Vast Array

We still have some of the “prettiness” of autumn here, but after much wind the past few days the leaves are quickly dropping. November tends to be the bare time in Northern Indiana. We do have two lovely spruce trees we can see from our bedroom window and the trees behind our condo are white pine so there is some foliage, but the overall impression will soon be stark naked tree limbs, empty brown soil in the fields, and few flowers except mums.

I had planned to include some photos of the retirement village library, but when I went over there this afternoon there were several people using the computers and I didn’t want to include them in my shots.

The library has over 2200 titles of fiction, not including maybe 150 mass market paperbacks that are not on the list. When we first took over the supervision, we had zero dollars to spend on acquiring books. We were pretty much dependent on donations. The Winona Literary Club gave us a gift of $100 last spring. We used almost half of that amount to buy some current books on Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. The residents who have their own computers wanted to become more skilled using that OS and software. No money doesn’t mean no incoming books, however.  Friday I stopped by for a few minutes to return a book, and I found 4 grocery bags full of books sitting on the floor next to the desk. I am still sorting through them, but so far we have 10 Christian fiction books new to us, and 2 non-fiction that we will definitely keep. Word is starting to get around that when a resident of the retirement community dies and the family needs to clean out the apartment, we will accept the books and dispose of those we don’t keep in a responsible manner.

We have some classics, some best-seller authors (Grisham, Cornwell, Steel, Sparks, Patterson), some fairly recently published books (Through My Eyes by Tebow; The Help by Stockett; Unbroken; No Easy Day), and lots of Christian fiction (Kingsbury, Phillips, Wick, Lewis, Brunstetter, Henderson, Blackstock, Thoene, Oke, Snelling, Gist to name a few). We have two residents who regularly donate their Love Inspired line of books mostly in larger and really large print, about 6-8 books a month.

Since I have little exposure to the Christian fiction genre, I am now starting to read a few of these each week if possible, plucking out different authors. With the holidays approaching, I am not sure I can keep up that pace, but I do have my Operation Christmas Child shoebox packed, though I haven’t started any other Christmas gift shopping.

I feel that my husband and I are making a valuable contribution to our retirement community by working in the library. It has its challenges (mostly limited space), but we have been blessed to see how God provides books for the residents. It has given us an opportunity to become acquainted with some of the apartment residents and some of the staff. The library “bowl” is full.