UW library scholarship winner 2007

So yeah, totally not, blatantly posting a recent blog because its been months and months and months since my last one lol. Anyway I kind of just wanted to post an essay I wrote that won a library scholarship! I was really happy because I really didn't think it would win. I had to read it at the UW Seattle campus and I was shaking like a leaf! lol.

The essay asked how has the library affected/changed you...

"People handle being a child in a military family in different ways. Some embrace it and find the new cultures and the constant stream of new faces and places exciting. Some are resigned to it and withdraw into a shell of shyness that is difficult to crack. Though these examples may be extremes in a kaleidoscope of reactions, I do think one thing holds true:

We have no roots.

I have always felt this way, that my life was missing that one essential something prominent in a normal person’s life. I broke away from the loneliness constantly moving can cause and began to love the places and the people that flew through my life. And yet, I longed to be connected, attached, I yearned to belong to a place. A place with memories that have become ingrained in the very ground walked upon by growing feet, where ghostly shadows of past remembrances would linger in the neighborhood, a home with a room that could have forever been mine:

I have no roots.

I lived in Japan for the first 13 years of my life, and I love it and will visit it one day. But return? My memories and my childhood, those roots that I have so long wished for, are scattered across its land as if carried away by the typhoons that rattled windows and gripped trees:

I had thought I would never grow roots.

But now I think I can feel them, tiny as they are, reaching into this land that bewilders and enraptures me in turns. I am not just a student. I am a part of this campus and I hope, wish, believe that roots are digging into this campus each day I work and love and help. I can feel them digging deeper each time I find myself trailing my hands across the mixture of old and new books and walls, each time I see a thankful smile of a fellow student turned patron that I have helped, each time laughter echoes and rings through the circulation room. Though these roots are small, they are far from feeble, and they will grow and spread and thicken. I will never forget and will never stop thanking the library that has been the tilled ground in which my roots have finally, desperately, begun to dig through. I can finally say:

I have roots at last. "

Yeah, I got pretty personal...

“There are two lasting bequests we can give our children: One is roots, the other is wings.”

~Hodding Carter



~netta