Witness Tree at the Arnold Arboretum

Visiting the horticultural library at the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University to prepare for my book launch tonight at 6 pm, who do I meet, but Larissa Glasser, library assistant and Lisa Pearson, head of the library and archives, on the very moments that they are taking Witness Tree into their collection at the library.

Now, for authors, really truly it doesn’t get much better than that, especially this author. My career as a writer was launched as a reader, tagging along with my mother to the public library in Chappaqua, New York, where she would gather stacks of reading, and I would race down to the children’s section to do the same. Out we would come to her station wagon, loaded down with books ready for a nice long read.

I had my own library card from earliest age and could check out as many books as I wanted. Every birthday meant a new hard cover book. And libraries have been my haven since those early childhood days. Fast forward to publication of Witness Tree on April 11, launched at the Seattle Public Library and hosted by the Seattle Public Library Foundation among other partners. What an honor to be feted that night in that beautiful public gathering place for learning and discovery.

 

And now, to watch Witness Tree get its barcode, label, and bookplate, to sign it with a flourish and see Larissa climb the book ladder to tuck it on the natural history shelf…right next to Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and Berndt Heinrich’s The Trees in My Forest — two books that inspired me in writing Witness Tree, how very wonderful indeed.

Particularly in this library. It’s open to the pubic, and even smells just as a library should: like old wood and books. Windows and views to the arboretum beyond make for a luscious setting, and the grand library table, so big it was built in place, and dating to 1892 make work here a special pleasure.

I don’t have a window in the cubical I inhabit in our mouse-infested mayhem of the newsroom at the Seattle Times, where I am the environmental reporter.  It will be nice, when back at work to think of Witness Tree on these beautiful shelves, in this gracious room, with its vast library table and the swell little wooden ladder for climbing the floor-to- ceiling shelves. The soft light from the bubbly old glass windows, the grandeur of this salon of books. Ah yes. How wonderful indeed. But better yet, I like to think of Witness Tree checked  out, busy in the world, with readers flocking to libraries, for wonder and discovery.