Perhaps it was because I was so terribly nearsighted, and that our television was only turned on for shows my parents liked, and because I knew that I was an awkward girl who didn’t attract friends, I sought information, companionship, and escape in books. Almost every noble and good thing I learned before I was ten years old came from books, including the Bible. I fell in love with books. A whole world, unlike the unhappy one of my home, was inside their covers.
I was a compliant child and rarely got into trouble. But one of the worst punishments ever inflicted on me – far more memorable to this day than anything physical – was when my mother took a half-read book away from me. Did I deserve this? Undoubtedly. She had given me The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which contained several of that detective’s most famous cases, for Christmas. A day or so later she told me to vacuum and dust my room. I shut the door, turned on the vacuum with every intention of doing what she said, but saw the open book on my bed and began reading. I never noticed the vacuum running as I finished one adventure and began another – but my mother did! And to my great distress she took the book away from me for a week. It sat on her bedside table taunting me for seven of the longest days of my life.
During the summertime, I would go out onto our Bermuda grass lawn and push aside the long branches of a weeping willow tree. There in the whispering hollow near the trunk, I would sit for hours reading. No one could see me, and I saw nothing else but the pictures in my mind. To this day a weeping willow tree portrays protection and peace to me.
Did you ever go and hide to read when you were young? Where did you go?
About Ariel Lawhon
Ariel Lawhon is the co-founder of She Reads, novelist, blogger, storyteller, and life-long reader. She lives in Texas with her husband and four young sons (aka The Wild Rumpus). Ariel believes that Story is the shortest distance to the human heart.
this resonates with me….i hid when i was a child to read. i come from a very noisy, loud boisterous household that had in 9 people – 7 children and my parents. i would walk to the library and spent many a summer there, but when that wasn’t an option i would sit in a corner in the dining room, next to the radiator, block out all the noise around me and read to my heart’s content. ahh, the memories!
When I was 9 or 10 we moved into a split level with a family room and a living room. There was no furniture for the living room, but it had plush wall-to-wall carpeting and a huge west facing picture window. I spent so many Sunday afternoons laying in the middle of the room with the sun on my back, reading. Happy, warm memories.
Loved this post! I remember receiving “Alice in Wonderland” as a child and I was hooked on reading. With a book in my hand, I could be anyone I desired and go anywhere I desired.
I was (and still am) a voracious reader! At one time I would read anything that came my way, I have become a little more discriminating in my tastes but still love a wide variety of books. I too grew up in a large family with lost of chores to be done. I would climb the huge cedar tree in our front yard and sit at the very top( because my mother couldn’t see me up there ) and read for hours. I also would hide under the covers with a flashlight and read for hours into the night.
So many memories come to mind — both good and bad. I, like you, read to escape a childhood that was less than ideal. In the summertime, I would take a book up a tree in the vacant lot next door. In the wintertime, I would curl up on a loveseat in our unused living room.
My bedroom was my haven. I remember a rainy days in the summer,curled up on my bed next to the window. The sound of the rain and a good book was sweet and I did’nt know it then but I sure do now.
Nylse, I can’t imagine trying to read in such a large household! I bet it helped you later in life to concentrate on tasks. Is that so?
Heather, you living room sounds like something out of a dream. I would love to have such a room — and the youthful agility to get up off the floor after reading for a while!
Vicky, one of my favorite books as a child was Alice in Wonderland. I still have the inexpensively-bound copy of it. It has never lost its fascination for me.
Constance, so you had a tree for a hiding place too! Did you not ever lose your balance and fall when you got involved in reading?
Meghan, you like Constance must have been considerably less clumsy than I was. I would have fallen out of the tree. I used to escape to an old chicken cook in the lot next door to our house in Farmington NM. To this day, chicken manure doesn’t smell bad to me. Weird, I know.
Sherry, I loved rain sounds too but in New Mexico that’s a rare sound. But I had a pyracantha bush outside my window and I loved the way it scratched against the screen in the wind.
Reading has always been my favorite thing to do. I remember my sister and I going to the bookmobile every week and feeling so rich with all those books surrounding us. My mom passed her love of reading down to me and it continues on in my children and their children. I still have my books Little Women, The Bobbsey Twins, Five Little Peppers and others that I would read over and over. The adventures I have been on! One of my favorite reading spots was the love seat in our den, sprawled across it reading while eating a huge spoonful of peanut butter dipped in sugar!
OOPS! See what happens when you don’t proofread. Meghan, I meant an old chicken COOP, not cook. An old chicken cook would be scary, I’d think. Talk about hell’s kitchen.
Wow, this caught me by surprise, bringing up memories that have been long forgotten. When I was young, we lived in a house built on a slope, with the lower level underground in the front and above ground in the back. We had no neighbors to the left of us, just an empty lot with scrub brush leading down to a creek. In the summers, I would escape to the hill on the side of the house, my back against the cool bricks of the lower-level of the house, half-way down the hill, book in hand. I couldn’t see or hear anyone else. As the oldest of five, I treasured this time alone with my books. Thanks for bringing me on this stroll down memory lane.
Deb, I can feel those cool bricks against my back, too. Thank you for the vivid picture.