Two years ago I splurged on an Electric Blanket at the LLBean Outlet in Freeport, Maine. We were there for a late August camping trip and stopped at the store on the drive home. Perusing through the clearance section, I noticed a vinyl zippered blanket bag shoved behind a stack of beach towels. When I pulled it out, I saw it was the very same blanket I had been eyeing for months—at a discount.
Once I got home, I shoved it in the back of my closet behind piles of sweaters and long underwear. It wasn’t until November that I remembered I had it—right about the time I climbed into bed and felt frosty cold sheets on my bare toes. Thrilled to have my own personal heater, I dug the blanket out of the closet, smiling at the sound of the zipper opening and imagining the warmth the blanket would bring. The wrapper fell to the floor and I lifted the blanket up to my cheek; it felt like pressing my face against a bunny’s fur.
I enthusiastically unfolded my new blanket, plugged it into the socket beside my nightstand, and threw it over the down duvet before climbing back into bed. I nestled deep under the blankets and reached over to grab one of the many books next to me on the floor—A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Now that I was cozy and warm, it was time to experience what life was like in a New York tenement house in the early 1900s.
Some stories are passed down and told to us so many times it seems like we remember them ourselves. Sometimes the memories and the stories collide and we aren’t sure the difference between the two. My first reading story is one such memory; I’m not sure I actually remember it, but it was shared with me so many times it feels like I do.
I was three, or maybe four, and I was sitting on top of my Grandma’s kitchen table with a book in my hands; stuffed animals spread all around me in our daily circle story time. I opened the book, smiled, and began to read.
Katie the kitten, a small tiger cat, asleep in the hall, curled up in a hat.
My mom, who had just gotten off work, walked in the door just as I turned the page and read the next one.
Just watch her jump up on her chair // To snap at a fly that is buzzing up there!
“Mom!” she quietly said to my Grandma, so as to not disturb my story time; “Did you see this? She’s reading!”
My Grandma, having seen me do this multiple days in a row, giggled and grinned a playful grin. “Yes, she knows that book backward and forward. She’ll ‘read’ it to you if you ask.” My Grandma was mostly a hands-off grandparent; she read books to me, but she wasn’t one to sit on the floor and play games. She allowed me to do my own thing. She continued with her chores while I played, peeking in at me from time to time. Stuffed animal story time was one of my favorite games. She knew I wasn’t reading. I had the book memorized. I knew when to turn the page and when to pause for punctuation, as if I were reading it straight off the page, but my mom didn’t know Grandma read me this book hundreds of times. To my mom, it looked like I was reading, fluently.
Katie the Kitten was a launching point for the presence of books in my life. I read voraciously; my nose in a book at every meal. Books became my best friends, taking me out of the world around me and into a world where every character trusted me enough to share their story. I wanted to know how other people lived. I wanted hope that life could be better, if only circumstances were different. I longed for something bigger than the double-wide trailer I grew up in. The library answered my call.
As a tween, I would stay in my room for hours, curled under a blanket reading a book. Like Bastion in The Never-Ending Story, I’d grab a sandwich from the kitchen, a Coke from the refrigerator, and retreat to my bedroom, where I would pull an old tattered quilt over my head, and travel to whatever land was in my current book of choice. We didn’t have much, but through reading, I was the richest girl in the world.
Reading became the way I learned about life beyond my own. Through stories I learned about babysitting (The Babysitters Club), about puberty (Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?), how to stand up to a bully (How to Eat Fried Worms), how to deal with an annoying little sister (Beezus and Ramona), how to escape from Nazis (Number the Stars), how to live through my parents’ divorce (Dear Mr. Henshaw), and how to relate to other kids in school (Wayside School is Falling Down), just to name a few.
Beyond wanting to get lost in stories, I also craved facts. Discovering encyclopedias in the elementary school library convinced me the answer to any question can be found in a book. You want to know about butterflies? Find a science book. You want to know how caterpillars feel when becoming butterflies? There’s a book for that too—Hope for the Flowers—but beware, all caterpillars don’t feel the same thing, so you may have to expand your mind just a bit.
Through reading, I fell in love with the written word, and from a very young age I began to write. I wrote my first book in second grade in a school assignment to introduce myself to the class. As I got older, I filled journals with poems written wrestling with my distraught relationship with my dad. When I didn’t know how to tell my mom what I was going through, I’d write her a letter instead. The written word—both those I read and those I wrote—helped me make sense of the world.
Reading and writing have always been about both comforting my soul and challenging my mind. Books can become comforting blankets that take cold realities of life away and bring warm hope for better days ahead. Sometimes the book we escape to isn’t always a happy place, but books give us a safe way to enter an unknown land. They invite us to live a life unlike our own. They expand our perspectives and open our hearts. It’s possible a book can tear us apart when we begin to understand that other people have it worse off than we do.
Reading is like taking a magic blanket ride all over the earth, allowing us to travel to places we’ve never been, to see things we’ve never seen, to experience things we can never otherwise experience.
I’ve been inside a concentration camp during World War II. I traveled underground to escape Nazis in Hungary. I woke up and forgot everything about the last 20 years. I went in search of myself in Italy, India, and Indonesia. And then I found the guts to leave my own husband too. I’ve lived on death row. Fought for my life. Died. Traveled to London during the plague and tried to steal Shakespeare’s plays. I’ve had sex on the beach in Nantucket with the leader of a boy band, fought warlords in Havana, and escaped on a train to Key West.
I watched a grandmother be shot on the side of the road, traveled back in time over and over again on the day JFK was shot, and meandered through a dismal earth after civilization was destroyed. I’ve explored the world throughout the years, but I’ve only begun to scrape the surface of where I’d like to go.
I keep a running list of books I want to read and anytime I find one at a thrift store or on sale, I splurge and add it to my bookshelf. I may not read it right away, but I know one day I’ll be glad I have it. A few days after I dug my electric blanket out of the closet, I finished A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I walked to the line of bookshelves in my home office and stared at the shelves. The Night Watchman seemed to call my name; it was time to travel to rural North Dakota in 1953.
This is the second post in The Darling Files, a project initiated by my friends Rachel Nevergall and Callie Feyen. You can read more about The Darling Files from Rachel here and from Callie here.
