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.

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.

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