As far back in childhood as I can recall, I was the girl that lived life with my face planted in a book. Often, it didn’t matter what I was reading; it just mattered that I was reading. To this day, I still have a fear of being somewhere and finding myself with five minutes to spare and nothing to read. I’ve always loved reading, and I always will.
So it was with keen interest that I watched my daughter, a relatively new reader, pick up the book I’d been reading to her, Little House in the Big Woods, and begin reading it herself, too impatient to wait for me to begin the next chapter.
It reminded me of when I first read the Little House series myself, beginning the series with my mother’s reading and ending it with my own. I remember waiting impatiently after I finished each book, anxious for my grandmother to mail me the next.
My childhood reading of Little House in the Big Woods took place in a subdivision at the edge of farmland in the Chicago suburbs. And now here Baby-girl was, all these years later, reading the very same book on a deck at the edge of the Atlantic.
She sat reading for quite some time, wrestling with new words and imagining a world far, far away.
It’s funny how both of us have now sat in entirely different times and places, and yet we both have found ourselves, courtesy of Laura Ingalls Wilder, on the edge of the same new world.