With Valentine's Day around the corner, the Friends of the Amagansett Library have picked an opportune time to launch a campaign asking the community to "Show Your Love" for the library and its soon-to-be flower and children's gardens, now in the planning stages.
Emails announcing the campaign went out this week to some 1,900 people -- the parents of schoolchildren and Girl Scouts, members of the hamlet's citizens advisory and village improvement committees, animal lovers, golfers, tennis players, library-card holders, and everyone else in the community whose email address is known to a Friend. Ten-year-old Chloe Cairns, a fifth grader at the Amagansett School, created a lively drawing to add some springtime color to the emails.
"Instead of sending a Valentine, buy a brick," the emails urge. Each $250 brick, inscribed with words of the donor's choosing, will be custom-engraved and set as edging to border the garden beds, which are being designed by Charlie and Sons Landscapes of Amagansett.
Charlie and Sons, which gave the library a liberal friends-and-family discount on the plantings, will start work around April 1, by which time it is hoped that most of the bricks will be spoken for. "They've been very generous," said Lauren Nichols, director of the library. "We wouldn't have been able to move forward this fast without them."
The bricks, with up to three lines of thoughts, can be ordered online as of Thursday, at amagansettlibrary.org/Friends.