Since I'm still practicing grammar in my writing, I'm going to continue to use different tenses and conditionals in this post. This time, however, they'll be quite random, since I want to figure out how much I’ve learned.

When I was a child, I visited my local library quite often. Unlike many suburban libraries, there were books for any taste and age, from encyclopedias to children's books. I always walked for hours among the long rows of bookshelves, amazed by the abundance of books waiting to be discovered. More often than not, I couldn’t make a choice about what I wanted to read. While I poked around old volumes and magazines, the librarian was usually making coffee or reading a book, so we didn’t bother each other. She was a middle-aged woman with a soft voice, who always wore old-fashioned clothes that somehow didn’t look out of place on her. In the evening, after work, she'd shut the door and leave the library, and would return the next morning at the same time.

For me, this woman was always the epitome of an avid reader, giving up so many things in her life for the sake of her strongest passion, reading. She didn't have a husband or children, and I never saw her with a man. Sometimes, though, she brought her cat to the library. It was a big and fluffy, with hefty eyes and massive paws, always ready to pounce. After discovering the cat at the library for the first time, I was afraid of her biting me for quite a long time. But she got used to me and then we got along very well. I’d never had a pet before I met this cat, so it was quite a surprise when I realised that we liked each other.

Since I had a brother, a pet in the family was out of the question; my parents were fairly tired of two restless adolescents turning everything upside down, so, if we had adopted a pet, it would have become too chaotic at home. I was already in my 20s when my parents finally decided to adopt a dog, which surprised them as much as it did me. They had been hesitating for months before they finally got the dog. Even though this dog brought a lot of joy to their lives, it was also quite the source of stress for them.