12 April 2009

Hespeler (Cambridge), Ontario, Canada


Carnegie Library release #3 was done on a rainy day, 3 April 2009. This was a really special one for me. See, Hespeler is the part of Cambridge in which I (mostly) grew up. It's also where my mother, who died when I was a little girl, grew up. I don't know tons about the history of this particular branch, but from what I can gather, Hespeler received its Carnegie grant of $14, 500 in 1923, and this is what they built with it. Minus the glass encasement... that was added a few years ago. I don't particularly like its look from the outside, but it is cool from the inside, and it was a way to preserve the old Carnegie building... I'd much rather have it this way then have had it torn down. To some cooler pictures (especially pictures of the inside of the library, which is the really cool part), check out this link.

Anyway, Hespeler is a special place to me in general because it always makes me feel somehow connected to my mother, even when I feel like I don't remember her much. The library especially does this because 1-- reading was kind of a special thing for us. We used to read together all the time, and she taught me how to do it, and those are happy memories for me; and 2-- because it was the same nice old Carnegie library when she was a little girl in the 50s as it was when I was a little girl in the 90s. Because of this, I chose a special book for this location-- When We Were Very Young, by A. A. Milne. If you'd like to see what has happened to this book since then, just click its title!

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