My earliest book memories are of my dad reading to us before we went to bed.  We sat on the green “leatherette” couch in the den, one on each side of Dad while he read.  The book I distinctly remember was The Puppy Who Chased the Sun by Wonder Books.  The dog’s name was Wilbur.  We loved that book and asked for it to be read over and over and over.    My dad came to loathe that book and would grumble and rumble every time but he always re-read it.  I am curious.  Why do parents ask their children what they want to be read if they really do not want to comply with the request?  Parents dictate everything else, why not that?  Well not everything else.  We got to decide if we really wanted something to cry about too.

What astonished me when I just thought about Wilbur is we were at least four years’ old then because that is how old we were when we moved to the new house that Seth Craft built with the green “leatherette” couch.  I have memories before then of the old house but none of being read to there.

My memories are about my twin brother sitting on the neighbor’s front step and yelling through her screen door that she, the “son of bitz”, stole our refrigerator (my brother was a prodigious user of bad language by the time he was three from hanging out with my grandfather and the ranch hands all day).  Another memory is when we both got worms from eating mink food (raw ground  horse meat) off the top of the mink pens.   And the coup de resistance is my grandmother sewing a green dress for my brother because he was jealous that she always sewed dresses for me but she only made him a carpenter’s apron.  So he got his dress in his favorite color and when my dad saw him in it he had a cow and the dress went way back in the closet.    

My mother spent hours of every day reading so our love of reading is no surprise.  What is a surprise is my collection of books since the library was the way we went.  Growing up we trundled to the library once a week returning our read books and choosing new books.  On Christmas and our birthday we received books as gifts and when I got into the Nancy Drew series I received those more often but not real often.  I have a huge respect for public libraries and my mother’s ashes are scattered under the pine trees just outside the entrance to the Carnegie Public Library in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, which was our library.  (If that is illegal I have no idea who actually scattered the ashes. You’d have to ask around.)

I am not sure when buying more books than I could read if I started now and did nothing but read until I keel over sucked me in but it continues unabated.  Just this week the mailman delivered eleven books that I ordered just last week from Amazon.  Granted five of them are gifts so, let’s be fair here, only six of them are for me.