In September, I didn’t write about the horrific blow that was dealt– the loss of my co-librarian, partner-in-crime to budgetary cuts due in part to the pandemic. The 2020-21 school year would have been our sixth year together making magic in the library with our high schoolers.

I didn’t write about it because it was a painful experience which didn’t happen directly to me and I wasn’t going to write her story. Maybe a future post will be a guest post of hers.

I’m writing about it now because tomorrow the reset button will be hit. She will be back in the building, in the library, and with me. It will look different because we’ve lost of our teaching assistant, all of the students are not back in the building, and there are serious renovations happening right outside the library as part of a massive construction project projected to finish in another five years.

Though we will fall into the same routines of planning, prepping, teaching, and booktalking because we’re peanut butter and jelly, Bert and Ernie, pen and paper, thunder and lightning (you get the idea)– better together. For our students. For our professional selves. Personally.

But I will also be different.

As I’m sure she will be. Changed by a pandemic, institutional choices, money.

How have you been changed by the items above? What stories do you have to tell?