She remembered the neighbor’s collie that used to escape through the back fence whenever there was thunder.

None of those details mattered to a lawyer.

They weren’t worth money.

But they gave my earliest years their shape back.

One Sunday I asked Evelyn why she had become a school librarian.

“Because libraries were the first places I could go without somebody asking why I had no real family,” she said.

“I could read about any sort of family I wanted.

Eventually I figured out children deserved a place where they could feel that welcome too.”