“I actually like change,” Rachael Miller said as I interviewed her for the July cover story in Evince Magazine. A life-long lover of libraries, I had started attending the writers’ group that she directed.
In the midst of a flowing interview, her words made me pause. I would like to consider myself a flexible, open person, but I remembered a time in my 20s when seeing the refurbishment of my childhood library made me cry. I had moved from Chesterfield County to Danville, Virginia, for my first real job, but came back frequently to visit. Seeing the Bon Air Library (has any library in the suburbs ever had a name that offered more “scope for the imagination”?) under construction filled me with joy. A library undergoing construction is a library being used by patrons and supported by the local government.
The completed refurbishment was astonishing. A new layout, sections for teens and children, and a show-stopping new feature that clouded before my eyes as they filled with tears. While I raced against the welling in my eyes to get outside of the building and to my car, I recalled with a sudden jolt of recognition a youth minister and chairs.
A friend of mine was a youth minister in an aging (in fact dying) church. During its robust days, the church had accumulated many adult and child-sized chairs. While still useable, the chairs weren’t useful for the elderly church, so they were being donated to various congregations around Richmond, in time for Vacation Bible School (VBS).
A great solution, and yet my friend had found a clutch of children’s chairs—the exact kind needed for VBS—squirreled away in a forgotten Sunday School classroom. He suspected the chair-hoarder was an older congregant who had opposed donating the chairs and many other changes in the church.
While the youth minister figured out what to say to this woman, a new church came to collect the chairs that my friend had pulled out of isolation.
My friend was expecting conflict from the woman, but instead, she joined him during the pickup, looking at the dozens of tiny chairs covering the lawn. “I remember when they were all filled with children,” she said.
So it wasn’t really about change or chairs. It was about loss.
She and I had already lost, or been losing for years—she had been losing her church and I had been losing my childhood.
A church doesn’t die overnight. Families gradually stop coming, and nurseries slowly need fewer volunteers to play with babies during the service.
My parents still live in my childhood home, but its rooms and yard have slowly lost the markers of young kids. The yard is a botanical masterpiece, but it has replaced me and my brother’s haven for childhood adventures. The treehouse disappeared in pieces as the wood rotted away, and its mighty maple foundation was cut down, replaced by an ornamental tree and flowerbed. The sandbox under the wood fort my dad made became my mother’s overflow gardening station.
The most important tree in my life, the magnolia, was cut down. It was the tree that taught me how to climb, in fact, that taught me that magnolias are the best trees for climbing. My mom had nailed boards halfway up, giving me a platform to hide on and watch neighbors and look at her rose bushes. Replacing the magnolia was my mom’s expanded bed for lilies, columbines, and irises. No more high-maintenance roses.
I suspect for both me and the church-lady, our losses had been growing for years, if we could admit that to ourselves. But a small, steady drip of loss can be ignored, in a way that 50 tiny chairs by a loading truck or a tree inside a library cannot.
