One year for Christmas I received a box, a paper box, the kind that offices get with 10 reams of paper. In it were 7 (or is it 8?) hard bound books, brand new with their crisp pages and shiny sleeves, lovingly wrapped in pink and yellow tissue paper. I remember opening that box in wonder, carefully extracting each of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, enraptured. The following weeks and months my love of reading was solidified, as I wandered the Big Woods and the Banks of Plum Creek. I read them slowly that year.
However, in 5th grade, I re-devoured them. A week was spent in a cloud - I shivered during the Long Winter and experienced the flutter of new love riding way too fast with Alonzo in his buggy. I despised him as he spent money and wasted Laura's toil on the Homestead. "Susie, SUSIE," my mom called, but I didn't answer: I was no longer Susie. If she'd have called "Laura, LAURA," I'm sure I'd have come running. Awake until all hours of the night with a flashlight under the covers, I then spent the next day in school with the book on my lap, reading at every opportunity*. (*Really, it's the only time I remember willingly disobeying the rules.)
Reading is my favorite escape. But I haven't been reading lately. I've a stack of articles and books on my desk and in my handbag. I take them from work to home, home to work, and back again. Just as the barren years of college when I read neither for work or pleasure, I am again finding myself too overwhelmed with work to enter into the joy of reading, but too tired of it all to bring myself back to work when I can rest. I despise this time in the waste-land of not reading. I'm never sure what starts this barrenness of input, but I don't like it a'tall.
