Bibliophile Me

As one gets older and reflects on the important parts of their lives...I would hope that the time spent with loved ones, blood related or not be at the top of the list.
Maybe a pleasent memory of how your childs small fuzzy head smelled the first time you held them. Maybe the memory that captures you is the first time you made love to someone you felt you had known all your life and had been waiting for since the beginning of time.

But I know I would have to add my love of books to my reflective memories. Not to bemoan my life as a child, but when one hops from home to home never knowing where they will end up, books seemed to me to be the only constant.

I carried a tattered copy of Pippi Longstockings everywhere I went. I've long since lost the book, but can remember reading it and the comfort it brought each night as the words lulled me to sleep.

As a child I read everything and anything...devouring books cover to cover and then all over again. E.B White, and Judy Blume were companions.

When I was a pre-teen, I'd read those big Readers Digest condensed books. They were good for 4-5 stories. And this is the age I discovered James Herriot and his tales of being a veternarian in soggy England. I'd laugh out loud at his tales. He swooped out of the pages and carried me to the mucky old wet barns to deliever calves with him. I was there. Edgar Alan Poe fasinated me too at this time.

Then as I grew older more was available to me. I read gothic romances, which somehow I still find pleasure in, even though I dislike romance books. I read Dorothy Gillman, and "Gone with the Wind", Margret Mitchell's one and only novel. My grandmother who is also an avid reader, bought me a copy of Marquis De Sades , "Justine" . I was shocked but also totally captivated. (she had no idea what it was, lol) I also read J.D. Salingers "Catcher In The Rye", I was Holden. "The Tale of Two Cities"....ahhhh, nothing to be said about it really, it speaks for itself.

I could, back then, read 5-7 books a week, if not more....drinking in every word as if I were thirsty and the words were the only thing that could quinch me.
Becoming and adult and falling in love with the portrait, painted by words that could make me laugh or cry or see the world so differently than I had before, opened a whole new world for me.

Now when I open a new book and hear that soft cracking noise of the spine or open an older book that has lost the crisp ping of pages being newly opened, and a musty smell lifts and finds its way to my memories...I know that I will be on an adventure shortly.

So books are a very big part of my life and I hope that my love for them will grow in my children.

Surely I'm not the only one who feels this way......