By John Maruskin
Do you loathe February? You know, despite the fact that it’s the shortest month of the year, it’s cold, bleak, wet, house-chilling, car-stalling, toe-numbing, seasonal affective disordered, plain old enough of winter already days seem to go on forever! It gets aggravating. What’s a person to do?
It’s obvious. Go to the Clark County Public Library.
First of all, the library is warm, colorful, well-lit and cheerful. A few of the major compliments we get about our library is that it is beautiful, bright, and that everybody here is having a good time. If you’ve spent January cooped up at home regretting your inability to follow through on New Year’s resolutions, the tonic for that isolation induced malaise is to come to the library and watch brightly dressed children skipping blithely to story hour, adults interrupting their enjoyment of magazines and newspapers to chat, genealogists sharing search tips in the local history room, and people of all ages entertaining and educating themselves with books, CD’s and DVD’s.
The library in February is hope central because we have the facility and all the ingredients you need to replace the dread that winter will never end with the glad assurance that spring is on the way. You can redefine February at the library. At the library, February is not a month of slush. It’s Valentine month, the season of returning migratory birds, and best of all, the time to really start planning gardens, maybe even get in a few early greens.
We have books and media to help you plan and accomplish all of those things and anything else you want to do; and if we don’t we can get the information for you, or send you to right place to find what you need. Come to the library and you can bloom earlier than the forsythia.
Vis-à-vis Valentine’s Day, look to your left as you come into the library foyer especially during the early days of February. There you’ll see what I think is one of the jolliest and most heart-warming displays ever. Patron Pat Nowack has graciously let the library show her collection of Valentine cards made over decades by her mother, June Jeppe, and her daughter, Meg Nowack.
These are fabulous, classic cut-and-paste collage Valentines, the very epitomes of personally saying “I Love You,” or some whimsical variation of that sentiment, like the card with a frog that says, “You’re unFROGettable,” or the one with a cute Sandra Boynton sheep holding a tennis racket looking at a heart overhead that reads, “I lob ewe.”
Made with construction paper, candy sampler tin foil, paper doilies, yarn, and pictures from old cards and magazines, these cards prove that the old cynical truism about time being money is bosh. Time spent making things like these cards is love. Somewhere in heaven, the library’s patron saint of cut and paste, Lenora Perkins, is pulling on an angel’s feathers and exclaiming, “Aren’t they wonderful?” Yes, they are.
And to make sure that you kick off February with a laugh and love in your heart, this Wednesday, Feb. 6, at 2 and 6:30 p.m. Kentucky Picture Show is featuring Harold Ramis’ terrific comedy about an egotistical weather man who finds himself literally stuck in time on Feb. 2. All the chuckles you need to get the month going with sweetness and light.
No matter what Punxsutawney Phil said Saturday, there’s always an early spring at the library.
