Rose turned five in September and claimed the library.
Not formally. Not with a declaration. She simply began spending her free hours in it with the ease of someone who has identified the room that is most fully theirs and has decided to occupy it accordingly.
She read. Not at a rate that exceeded her age in dramatic terms, but specifically and with the selection criteria of someone who knew what she wanted, books about birds and buildings and the natural world and one phase, brief but intense, of books about oceans.
She also, I discovered one afternoon, wrote.
She had a notebook, spiral-bound, which she carried from her room to the library and back and which I had not looked inside because she had not offered it and the privacy was hers to offer.
I discovered the writing not from the
