Weeding

When I was a kid, the fellow across the street from us had a HUGE yard--he'd kept horses on it for awhile, unusual for the suburbs, so it really was a small pasture. Once the horses were gone, he decided to keep a more suburban landscape, using his tractor to pull gangs of mowers and an herbicide sprayer in his endless war with the dandelions. He's used so much spray over the years, the dandelions had actually become resistant and deformed--many of them with multiple heads on stems as broad as a thumb. And, of course, to the irritation of suburban neighbors, the seeds drifted into the yards all around him. As kids, it was our job, in the mid-summer heat, to dig, pull, dowse, chop--whatever it took to remove these telltale signs of what was considered an "inferior" yard from our lot. This was a generation or two before "green landscapes" had come into fashion. I now live in the country. I can't see my neighbors. I'm not entirely sure what grows in my yard, tho I do mow to keep the ticks and chiggers down. And based on my childhood experience with them, I've decided to make peace with the humble and hardy dandelion by honoring it as a native wild flower.

That said, weeds don't belong in the library. Particularly a library that is getting ready to move. This fall, my small branch community college library will merge with the small town library and move into a positively cavernous new (and LEED certified green!) building. The new library, which I can now see through windows across the hall, has a 25,000 square foot footprint. With LOTS of shelves. But the problem is, not only do we have to pay to move all the books, we also have to pay to migrate each catalog entry into the new system. And with the state budget the way it's been for the last while, there's a lot of deadwood here we don't need to pay to move anyway. I am sad to report that while we do have a lot of lovely new resources that directly support the curriculum, the average age of the collection is 1978. I expect a full third of the current collection to be out on the sales cart or donated to individual departments before it's over.

So in between my visits with Maddie, the job here will be weeding. Lots of weeding. The good news is, I'll be doing it in air conditioning with a barcode reader.