The Redfield Family Challenge

Why Libraries? All of us are veteran library lovers and users. All of us have and continue to benefit from the gracious wisdom and encouragement of the librarians we have met, as children and as adults. Indeed, we do love libraries. Who are the Redfields? The Redfield Family: There are seven people, one dog, and one cat in the Redfield family: Stew Smith and Sarah Redfield, now the grandparents; our children, Alex and Althea Redfield; Alex’s wife, Hillary Barter; and Alex and Hillary’s daughters, Hattie (Harriet), now 6, and Bea (Beatrice), now 3; Gumbo the dog who lives with Althea in New Orleans; and Mercury the cat who lives with the Barter-Redfields in South Portland. When Hattie was small, we began a grandparent/granddaughter challenge to visit all of Maine’s lighthouses. Most sources say Maine has 65 lighthouses, but we decided early on to focus on the ones we could reach or see by car or on foot. We did spot several more from the water around Eastport last summer when we visited Lubec and Campobello. This April, we visited our 44th lighthouse and started a new challenge—to visit all of Maine’s libraries. It is a much larger goal, but at least almost all of them are on land. Also, last fall Sarah began working with an AdHoc group of Maine volunteers concerned about efforts by the Maine Library Commission (MLC) to redefine what counts as a “public library.” The MLC approach seemed to particularly threaten Maine’s smallest and most rural libraries. The AdHoc group’s work to bring more attention to these small libraries and their stories paralleled the family library challenge and sparked the idea for a blog to accompany it. Sarah talked it over with Hattie and Bea, and both were eager to join in—especially Hattie, who can now read and write on her own. Both girls have contributed their impressions to the blog, and both insisted that it include pictures. Some of their drawings are already here, and more will be added. An Invitation We hope our love of libraries will be shared and become ever more contagious. We hope others will collaborate with us and add thoughts and images about Maine’s libraries. Above all, we hope that none of Maine’s libraries will be threatened, and that all of them will thrive as the essential parts of their communities that they have been for us.