A particular kind of mood is conjured up in November: a book read beside the stove, a novel tucked into a bag, a warm kitchen, a skirt drying beside the radiator, a poem read before bed. A domestic scene, perhaps, but not exclusively. An inner life can extend beyond the household. But many times, that’s where it all begins.
We have become accustomed to imagining that intellectual life happens elsewhere. I certainly picture universities, offices, libraries and studies. But for many generations of women, thought happened wherever they happened to be. Inspiration struck them while cooking stew, while gathering fruit, while swaddling babies.
For much of history, women have done their thinking in the margins of the day: while bread baked, while children slept, while laundry dried, before the household woke and after it had gone quiet. The great works of literature did not always emerge from quiet studies or university offices. Sometimes they began in kitchens, bedrooms, and borrowed moments.
What if these things aren’t opposite? What if the life of a homemaker was always enriched by the world of literature?
Long before I began working at Granby Public Library, another woman in Granby was growing up in a family that believed books should be available to the community. Emily Clemons Pierson, born in 1818, grew up in North Granby and her father helped establish the Granby Social Literary Society and lending library. Pierson went on to become a writer, educator and abolitionist. She also raised six children and ran a household.
How many women have been overlooked because their intellectual lives were intertwined with ordinary ones?
This is one reason libraries matter to me. They hold some of the local history that is waiting to be rediscovered, but they also make room for the intellectual life of the present. A library is a place where a person can temporarily step outside whatever role the day has assigned them and simply become a reader. That accessibility can transform a life, enriching an inner world that may otherwise go unnoticed.
This November, as kitchens fill with the smells of Thanksgiving and Granby’s fields settle into winter, I find myself thinking about the women who read and wrote here before us. They are a reminder that intellectual curiosity doesn’t require an ivory tower. Sometimes it begins at a kitchen table, with a book open next to a freshly-made breakfast. It’s at these very tables that the next generation of thinkers are being raised.