Why the Fox?

People occasionally ask why Erin Acres Library has a fox.

The honest answer is that I don't really know. The library simply needed a face.

As it happened, I already had a fox illustration I liked. It could just as easily have been a rabbit or a bear. At the time, I didn't think the choice mattered very much.

But then the fox appeared on the front page. It wandered into stories. It traveled on postcards. It became the library's logo and profile picture.

Little by little, every memory of Erin Acres Library found its way back to the fox.

Looking back now, I sometimes think foxes are my favorite animals. Perhaps they are. Or perhaps the years I spent building the library quietly made the fox matter.

Maybe that's how many favorites begin. Not because they were extraordinary from the start, but because life gradually gathers around them.

What we love is often not the thing itself.

It is the life we built with it.