Childhood Friends

Found a dusty copy of one of my favorite childhood books the other day: "Little Town on the Prairie" by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I sat right down on the floor in a shaft of sunlight and reread it. I looked in the front cover and saw my sister's name written in her childlike scrawl from elementary school. She loved those books too, probably because I used to read them to her when she was a wee thing.

The "Little House" books were the first books I remember really falling in love with as a kid; I recall the one summer I read the whole series, devouring one after another. And it's a testament that they still can be enjoyed by adults as well as by children.

The "Madeline" books were also childhood favorites; the free-spirited Madeline and her adventures in Paris and London. Laura Ingalls was a free-spirit, too. I loved how she would write about wanting to be like the Indians near their prairie home, wild and half-naked riding on a horse across the plains, and how she rebelliously refused to sleep in her corset in order to have a teeny waistline.

I can't imagine not having grown up with books; my parents read to all of us kids, and all of my siblings like to read, but I'm the one who truly loved to read: who always had my head in a book, sitting in a private spot under a tree.

This love of books is something I want to pass on to my kids, and I have already started to collect those treasured books from my bygone childhood days for them--like the "Little Golden Books" and "Aesop's Fables".