Carefully stepping into overgrown grass gone to seed, I lifted the leg of my pants. Royalty always elevates a skirt before moving through the thicket by foot. Regardless of whether this act may result in a tidy hemline. It is expected. Navigating around burdock, the car keys shifted in my pocket. I grasped my thigh and pressed the metal into my leg. Hard. I’ve sworn an oath to maintain the safety of these keys. The only ones known to open a portal to another world.

I eyed my destination. The entire frame of the old grey barn shifted more each year. The structure leaned alarmingly to one side. Decades had passed since the last of the dairy cows were sold off and farm equipment auctioned. I pretended to use one of the car keys to open a side door. They clinked softly as I returned them to my pants pocket. I forced the wooden barn door closed behind me. The stillness was sublime. The air thick with the rich sweet scent of hay. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply.

Where are you, my siblings? I must be released from this prison of an existence. I must find the door to Narnia.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis provided escape from the world I inhabited. The youngest of four children, I did my best to avoid my parent’s proximity and drug fueled violence. I’d roam the rural land for hours searching for the door. Entire days hidden in the woods of the Adirondacks, dense with trees, the ground obscured by plant growth. Miles of shale riverbed hiked and explored. As the season’s heat waned, I’d open milkweed pods and pile downy seeded strands at my feet. Eventually releasing them to the wind.

I would grieve the loss of summer until she returned.

Harsh winters forced almost all time to be spent indoors. Relying on books for strength, I turned to them more. Borrowed from friends and school libraries. Hidden under pillows. I devoured them during long nights locked in my childhood bedroom. Praying for moonlight sufficient to read by, I hoped to continue hours after the house fell silent.

I recognized characters. The insurmountable obstacles they faced. Beloved protagonists would misstep and at times intentionally hurt others. Individuals capable of selfless and cruel behavior. Motivated by fear and pain. Worthy of forgiveness.

My books gave me a means to briefly elude my reality. To access desperately needed respite. To discover characters resembling those I’d been hurt by. Like those I hurt. To find myself in the pages and grant her grace.

Now with three young children myself, I relish their request, “Tell us a tale Mommy! One we haven’t heard before!”

Completely immersed in story, losing sense of time and place, my boys intently focus on my words. I am filled with gratitude. I lead them to the secret door to another world. Together, we go through.

The part of the note I remember was, Ask nan what happened when I was nine. I was nine as I read it, and my mother, the note's author, had just left my father for another man. She had left me, too. She wasn’t gone for long, but my trust took a walk that day.

When I was 27, I read How to Paint a Dead Man. Sarah Hall’s four-stranded narrative was the opposite of resolved by its end. The point was not how these four characters were entangled, nor how their lives and stories mattered to one another’s. The novel is comprised of a series of ‘glancing-offs’—moments of interaction between characters that spiral out in unexpected ways—deep experiences held lightly and tiny moments causing interior avalanches. I rejoiced in the refusal of the neat and the simple.

In one of the storylines, a grieving Suzie betrays her doting partner in a grizzly act of sexual abandon. I found the scene neither abhorrent nor delinquent—instead, it was deeply resonant. This woman, surrendering to the wildness inside her, was claiming herself out of the wreckage of pain and loss. It was an act not weighed down in morality, but borne in the body. I could see this woman—her body, her desire—outside of the context of the world she inhabited, released from social strictures and expected behaviours. It was thrilling. It was monumental. It helped me remove ‘marital’ from the bed of my mother’s transgression; revealed to me the despair lacing all her actions after her father died. It was the start of both a strengthening resolve—as a woman, honouring my body and my knowledge—and a ‘gentling’—conceding that we can’t know what motivates others, not really, but we can choose to honour them with the benefit of the doubt. We can recognise that observing another’s behaviour offers only the slimmest sense of them—neither rooting us in the whys of their actions, nor allowing us to predict the fallout, the impact. This story dropped me right into the current of the colossal effort involved in dealing with our very selves—to say nothing of other people.

My mum’s affair wasn’t about me, nor was it about the way she mothered. Suzie helped me understand that. It didn’t heal the rift between me and my mum swiftly, nor did it undo the years of betrayal I felt. But it did help me let go of my harsh judgement, the kind that stays with the person casting judgement far longer than the person judged. Now I walk through the world with a softer gait, sensitive to the unknown depths of each human I glance at.

My mother loved to read aloud, and we always read a chapter of a book before my bedtime. My favorite books were Winnie the Pooh and Mary Poppins, followed by Wind In the Willows and Alice In Wonderland. We read the same books so often that I learned to read by following along. I had them memorized but loved having them read to me. I equated reading with love. I still do.

The characters were my best friends and were always available to me. As an only child who frequently moved due to my father’s job, this was important since other children were not still in supply. Books, in contrast, were.

We spent one summer living with my grandmother while my grandfather was seriously ill.

I was not allowed to play with the other children in the neighborhood, and all of the adults’ focus was on my grandfather’s health issues. Books saved me. By that time, I was reading Nancy Drew and solving mysteries.

Both sets of grandparents had homes crammed with books. I was never at a loss for something to do, and once I started reading, I left the real world and traveled to other times and places. I could happily entertain myself for a day. At night, I read under the covers.

By the time I was ten, I was dropped off at the library while my mother shopped. I quickly exhausted the blue biography books Childhoods of Famous Americans and other age-appropriate books. With my parents’ and the librarians’ permission, I read the books in the adult section. I discovered plays and read all of the Best Plays Theatre Yearbooks.

The smell of books was dizzying. Bibliosmia! I was disappointed to learn that that distinctive smell was actually from the chemical breakdown of compounds in the paper. No matter. For me, the scent will forever promise adventure.

Literacy has always been a wonderful gift, and I am proud to be on the board of directors for two libraries and a literary center.

(336 words)

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.

My parents created a slot canyon lined with blankets in the backseat where, tented by picture books, I camped for the nine-hour drive. Dick, Jane, Sally couldn't leave school grounds, but Sam I Am, Little Bear, and Miss Suzy the squirrel -- the entirety of my personal library -- accompanied me.

Previously, the few times my family had driven upstate, we left New York City after rush hour. Sunset burned outside the windshield. Above the illuminated highway stripes, black undulating humps rose lightless, lifeless.

"Mountains," my father said.

Monsters I heard and cowered.

This trip, we'd rise with the sun, drive all day, and get to Niagara Falls by dinnertime. None of us knew it back then, but we would move cross-state a total of five times in my first six years of school: west, east, south, north, center. Me the new kid, again and again and again.

By the second move I grasped that classmates couldn't be counted on. I formed reliable relationships with books, idolizing heroines who worked their way out of scrapes. The orphan who seeded her imagination across the fields and forests of Prince Edward Island. The freckled girl whose composition notebooks filled with peer reviews made her an outcast. The bored little sister whose route to adventure has since become an internet cliche.

If I moved between September and June, I'd look for my storyfriends during library period. In summer, my father would walk me to the town library where I'd sign my name to my own card.

The reunion always began with Anne. I'd search the stacks, M for Montgomery, hoping not just for Green Gables and Avonlea but all six Anne books. Then F for Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy, maybe even The Long Secret and Sport. The last a classic, C for Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

By the third move I earned adult borrowing privileges. That summer I took The Andromeda Strain on vacation.

"Who's carrying who?" an adult called out, seeing the thick pages propped against my bony knees. "The kid or the book?"

My father joined Book-of-the-Month Club and passed along The Martian Chronicles. I liked S is for Space, but Dandelion Wine shook the welcome mat of small town life. Clinton, NY felt too close to Green Town, Illinois.

Childhood warned me: Don't look back.

I stay present physically but risk time travel through literature, rereading the same 1983 Bantam paperback every two years.

Little, Big by John Crowley is set in a folly house -- a home with multiple facades of varying architectural styles -- where generations of Drinkwaters and Barnables truck with fairies and discover "the further in you go, the bigger it gets." Formerly a rootless child, protagonist Smoky Barnable marries into a house that's both prison and portal.

Similarly, in the slot canyon covid has scoured, I've returned to blankets and books. Hunkered down I'm liberated, joyous inside my head, my imagination the only home I've never, ever left.