Pale skin. Grey eyes. Long hair knotting in the wind. Gazing out over the ocean, wistful and longing. This is how I imagined my 11-year old self, elbows resting on the railing, overlooking the private courtyards of downtown Padua. Kit Tyler knew how I felt. What it was like to leave everyone you loved. What it was like to move far away. What it was like to not fit in.

I spent hours on our apartment balcony, slowly working through the injustices of my Dad’s sabbatical. My Mom’s insistence I go to an Italian-only speaking school. The simultaneous romance of the adventure and isolation of being functionally silenced.

I’d brought six books; all required reading to advance to 7th Grade when I got back to Ohio. Our little trio must have read each one a dozen times. The burnt orange cover of Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond marked our attention in fuzzy cream lines, the paperboard cracking through the film.

Although I didn’t want to give my Mom the satisfaction, at school I learned Italian and made friends. Julia and I would walk arm-in-arm for la patatine fritte after class. Sing duets to Paula Abdul. My “boyfriend” Luca looked just like Macaulay Culkin with gold wire-rimmed glasses.

As hard as it was integrating into Italian life - switching sneakers for monk shoes, learning to laugh off the ever-hopeful “Ciao Bella!” - I ended up needing Kit more once I got home. Childhood friends had moved on. New romances and alliances had formed. I had grown, too.

I cried when I returned to Padua a decade later. The city was grittier than I remembered. From the street, our balcony looked smaller, cruddier. Not the windswept cliff I’d envisioned myself standing on so many silent afternoons, hoping a ship and the Captain’s son would save me too.

In the years between, I’d moved six times. Always going, then returning. Five countries. Each time casting new friends, then leaving again for an increasingly foreign home. What would Kit do? Create home in people. Look for the outliers. Belong with the people who don’t belong.

Last week, a friend died from Covid. As I told my husband of his shyness, his kindness, I felt heat wave up my spine. A warmth of homecoming. All these years, I’d wished to fit in. To be part of a community. Now here, unnoticed, in the margins of my greater acts, I’d gathered a heart family, connected to each other by both circumstance and choice. Kit’s final realization became my own: “It was not escape that she had dreamed about, it was love”.

On long summer afternoons I often laid on my bed, careful not to muss the bedspread. The curtains at the window rustled slightly with a faint breeze, unusual during the daytime but ever present at night. My outfit was usually cotton shorts and some kind of sleeveless blouse or maybe a T-shirt, and I was always barefoot. My hair was in the pixie cut my mother preferred. I knew I could not grow it long until I was old enough to wash it myself and get the tangles out without pouting. I propped both pillows behind my head as I plucked my current book from the top of my bureau.

Outside the window my mother was hanging clean laundry on the line or picking sweet peas or green beans in the garden. I couldn’t hear her except when she spoke to Terrence as he crouched in the grass hunting for moles or field mice. The sound of Mr. Mollison driving his John Deere tractor in the field behind the house created a low rumble. The longer he drove, the more fragrant the air became from the clover he was threshing.

The book I took from my bureau was often a mystery, maybe Nancy Drew or the Happy Hollisters. Sometimes I read a biography of some famous woman we had studied in school that year. Clara Barton was a great favorite, although I knew already, I would never become a nurse – too squeamish and likely to exhibit every symptom of every disease. As the afternoon wore on, the sticky air became more even more dense, making it hard for me to breathe. Sometimes I spent the entire afternoon on my bed, finishing one book and starting another.

Soon enough my mother called from the kitchen, “Kathy, it’s your turn to set the table.” I reluctantly placed my bookmarker inside the book and returned it to the bureau. My other life beckoned, and I was again the youngest daughter, bound to her chores. Torn away from the real life I wanted one day to live.

I was drowning and I didn’t mind. Maybe I was ten, maybe I was twelve, but Where the Red Fern Grows had me by the neck and held me under its well of words. I read the book, then I read it again, each time drowning in letters on the page and tears by the time I reached the last of it. I named the first dog, a beagle, I ever bought for myself, Ol’ Dan. He snorted, was fat, he never hunted, but daily he reminded me of that book.

When younger than that, I lived in a neighborhood that had an ice cream truck and a bookmobile. The ice cream truck meandered our streets daily in the summer; it’s bell, heard blocks away, made my sister and me scramble for change, search under couch pillows, and beg our parents for treats. The bookmobile didn’t visit as often, maybe once a week or two, and although my sister was less enthusiastic, I raced around in the same fashion, gathering borrowed books to return so I could pick new ones.

The outside of the van had imaginary landscapes, Seussian characters, Puff the Magic Dragon, and flying carpets emblazoned on its sides. Inside was a dimly lit heaven. Shelves and shelves of bungeed books, a carpet with flattened roads and flattened buildings, green stars meant to be trees, and a small table, two chairs. My mother sat folded in a chair patiently, while my sister and I looked and looked until I finally picked two new books. I wanted to be a bookmobile driver when I grew up so I could borrow books anytime I wanted.

There was the town library, too. My first official signature in script was scrawled across the bottom of my first library card. That card opened worlds for me. In the books I borrowed, I saw myself, I saw the selves I could be, I saw the selves I would never be, but was glad to meet. I shook hands with each hero and each villain alike, taking what I could from them, borrowing (or stealing) wherever I wanted. I was a thief of words.

They danced in my head everywhere I went, and when I didn’t have a book, those words made for playmates that I could spend time with when my friends weren’t available. With them I created my own stories, my own worlds. Those words kept me up at night, visited me in my dreams, made dramatic appearances in my backyard and played house in my room. As a child, I spent much of my time swimming out in the ocean depths of words inside me, floating, drowning, and I didn’t mind.