Branch.
I've been in grand and magnificent structures, from palaces to cathedrals to the halls of power and the seats of education, and it's fair to see them with some degree of awe or wonder, since they're built to impress and overwhelm the visitor with the grandeur of riches and control, but once seen, they're often forgotten for me.
What unfailingly draws my eye, and has for all the decades I've driven by on my way in or out of DC or sat, watching, in my seat on the former #89 bus, is the little hole-in-the-wall space of the Mount Rainier Branch Library, which shines like a lighthouse from its tucked-away space off Route 1 there.
Libraries are my chapels, holding all the promise of the lush wonder of life in a way that a preacher intoning the same old words the same old way in the same old vaunted places never did, because of their contents.
When I was old enough to bicycle the three miles from our log farmhouse in Scaggsville, a thing possible in the age when parents raised us to be creatures of some self-reliance instead of eggshells to be shielded from reality at all costs, I could pedal out to the old humble midcentury modern gem of the Stanley Memorial Library in town, and when I strolled in, breathless, the whole world would unfold around me like all there is curling out of the shelves.
What I couldn't find, I could ask for at the reference desk, or request, and the machinery of distribution would track down the book I was looking for, bringing it to my own library, where I could check it out, tuck it into my backpack, and pedal home to ensconce myself in the little cave of my lower bunk to learn and learn and learn. I had such a hard time in school, trying to learn through the opacity of systems designed for other kinds of kids, but give me a stack of books and I could teach myself what a school struggled to imbue.
The little library on the side of the road there in Mount Rainier still holds that magic for me, and I think how nice it must be to be able to live in that built-up area, where a kid could walk the streets and duck into the refuge of a little library where the collection might be small, but the machinery of distribution could call in a wonderful world of new ideas. I've never set foot in there, myself, but I hold it as a possibility of a new and delicious moment I'll allow myself one day after looking through those windows for forty years.
It's somehow the lack of the consequential that calls out, the pleasant ubiquity of a ordinary place with an extraordinary power, and it's why I stop in community libraries when ever I'm out traveling, whether it's a modest modernist place in Dunn, North Carolina or the more classical brick Morgan County Public Library in Berkeley Springs West Virginia. Without a card, I'm bound to the moment of the visit, but even then, the magic holds, and the whispering calm of people working their way through a world of ideas is a pool of respite for a traveler on his way.
I think, sometimes, I'd like to write a whole book in libraries, just drifting around from library to library, unfolding my computer in a study carrel here or there or in a perfect little corner of a perfect space to sit with music playing in my earphones and pent-up stories unfurling like a roll of wire rolling down a gentle hill.
I sit and I feel at home in these shared spaces that are both mine and never mine in the way a collective home for thoughts often is, and it's so hard to be consumed by other thoughts, because, in the same way the overstated pornographic opulence of a cathedral or a palace is supposed to remind you of the payoff of worship and compliance to the bullying power of divine claims and hoarded wealth, the quiet humility of a little branch library reminds me of the gentle wisdom of an older friend of the family who, despite your age, sees you and all you can do.
I'll have to stop myself, because it will likely sound ridiculous to anyone who is not me, from telling the person at the counter, should I ever find myself in the Mount Rainier Branch Library of the Prince George's County Memorial Library System, that I've always dreamed of visiting the place and how I can't believe I'm actually, finally standing there, but I'll feel it.
I'll feel it.
For all that's wrong, for all that's falling apart and crashing down and dissolving into absurdity and nightmarish uncertainty, there will always be these refuges, and mine are full of shelves and ideas still left to discover, still inexhaustible even if I was to read and read and read until the end of my time on earth.
What is a greater wealth than that?
© 2026 Joe B. Wall
