Libraries are in my blood. My aunt worked in a library. My mother spent most of her working career in a high school library. My sisters and I all shelved books in our hometown library, as did one of my nephews. My niece works for a public library now. So, of course, when asked if author Kim Hays could write about her mother, who was a librarian, I jumped at the chance to post her piece.

My Mother’s Library

When I was almost six, my father got a job in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and we moved there from Virginia. Since my father had to work at his old job until just before the move, my mother flew to San Juan by herself to find a place for us to live, enroll me in first grade, and track down a neighborhood nursery school for my sister. Only as an adult did I realize how hard this must have been for my shy mother, who’d never been outside the US. But she was intelligent and determined, and she managed to get it done.

My school in Puerto Rico was English-speaking, and the first thing my mother did after settling into our new house and signing up for Spanish classes was to volunteer at the tiny school library. Again, it takes an adult’s perspective to realize how lonely and intimidated my mother must have felt, with my father going off to his stressful new job every day, leaving her to cope in a foreign culture with all the work that went into taking care of a family. It surely meant a lot to her to find refuge in that little room full of books, with an English-speaking librarian colleague, a few teachers coming in to ask questions, and now and then a child searching for something fun to read or needing help with a book report.

My mother’s job experience was as a newspaper reporter. Still, by the time I was in the sixth grade, she had a paying job as the librarian at another English-speaking San Juan elementary school. She had no library degree (she got one later when we moved to Vancouver), but that didn’t seem to bother her boss, the school principal, who was a woman. Mama’s new library was one medium-sized concrete room with louvered windows. It had low shelves along the walls, child-sized tables and chairs in the middle, and a checkout desk by the door.  This was in the sixties, so there wasn’t a computer in sight, just a card catalog, a date stamper, and an ink pad.

My sister Natasha and I long ago agreed that one of the best parts of summer in those days was when Mama’s books arrived. Classes in San Juan began after Labor Day, but the new children’s books for the library always arrived in mid-August, when it was sure to be over 90°. Our house had wonderful ceiling fans—the library, however, had fans and air conditioning! So on the day we unpacked the new books, my mother, Natasha, and I got to the library early in the morning, and Mama turned on the room’s single air conditioner.  Ahhh! Then she slit the tape on the book boxes and threw back the flaps to reveal that year’s treasures. Somewhere in those boxes was the next book in Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy family series, the latest Newbury winner, or another story about Taran of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander. Thanks to those boxes, we discovered Ruth Sawyer’s Roller Skates and Emily Neville’s It’s Like This, Cat. We were diving into precious plunder.

For two or three days in a row, we’d drive with Mama to her library, bringing a picnic lunch and staying all day. The books were soon unpacked, and she got busy cataloging. I’m sure my sister and I helped her with the shelving, but I’m afraid we weren’t much use otherwise. We just read and read and read. 

We were not poor children. We had our own books at home—all of the Oz books, for example (and I mean all thirty-eight of them, by all the different authors), not to mention classics like Mary Poppins, Little House on the Prairie, The Secret Garden, and many more. We also checked books out of the Carnegie Library near our house. But those long days of reading in Mama’s library were different from reading at home. In that special place, we were away from reality altogether, enveloped in the smell of new books, entranced by the colorful paper covers, cushioned from our raucous everyday lives in the quiet world of fiction. 

It’s only recently that I’ve begun writing fiction myself.  Working on my mysteries, I’ve learned what any writer knows: that when authors are on a roll, they are transported into their own worlds. Uninspired hours of depositing word after word onto the page are rewarded with periods of blissful, unselfconscious inventiveness.

I believe every job, no matter how mundane it may seem to the people who don’t do it, has these moments of flow, when all is in balance, and the Force is with us! When my work as a mystery writer rewards me like this, the happiness and energy I experience are very much akin to the excitement I felt in Mama’s library with all those new books.

Sons and Brothers, the second police procedural in Kim Hays’s Polizei Bern series, was published on April 18 by Seventh Street Books. In it, a cardiac surgeon in his seventies is attacked and drowned in Bern’s Aare River. The district attorney suspects the victim’s estranged son Markus, but Bern police detectives Linder and Donatelli have other ideas about the crime. In her endorsement of the book, Julia Spencer-Fleming says, “Giuliana Linder and Renzo Donatelli are compassionate, conflicted, and utterly compelling. Sons and Brothers is a must-read.”

Kim Hays is a dual Swiss/US citizen who lives in Bern with her Swiss husband. The first book in her Polizei Bern series, Pesticide, was shortlisted for a Debut Dagger Award by the Crime Writers Association, and Deborah Crombie called it “a standout debut for 2022.”For more information about Kim and Switzerland, see www.kimhaysbern.com.