The recent cold snap brought out the best in Airdronians.
If you follow social media, you would have seen all sorts of posts from people whose furnaces or water lines or cars had gone kaput in the frigid temperatures.
The responses to these and myriad other situations were amazing and wonderfully human.
Neighbours, businesses, service groups, and total strangers came to the rescue.
Retails workers braved the cold to keep us caffeinated, our fridges stocked, and our vehicles gassed up.
Garbage was collected, goods were transported, and the mail showed up.
Even your own Airdrie Public Library (APL), with the help of the City of Airdrie, extended its hours so anyone who needed a warm place to hang out, including their furry companions, could do so.
All of this leads to an important question, if you weren’t dealing with a potentially life-threatening situation last week, what did you do while Mother Nature slapped a freeze on us?
One APL patron, when asked this question, said, “I couldn’t go into work, so I read two novels.”
She looked away for a moment, and then added, “Does that make me a bookworm?”
According to the Oxford dictionary, a bookworm is either a wood-boring beetle or a person devoted to reading.
One is the arch enemy of paper and glue, and the other is simply a friend of books.
Did you know, that around the world, nearly every language has a name for people who love reading, made even more humorous when translated into English?
Book flea (Indonesia), library mouse (Romania), read-rat (German), ink drinker (French), reading horse (Danish), book moth (Arabic), page mage (Croatian), book eater (Greek), book insect (Hindi), word-fiddler (Ukrainian), and even book swallower (Welsh).
So, whether you’re a bookworm or a word-fiddler, the love of reading can get you through challenging times.
For information on your library and its collection, visit www.airdriepubliclibrary.ca
