Avid Reader

From a very early age, it was apparent that Emily was a book lover.  I began to read to her when she was just an infant and we ended each day with a bedtime story.   While this is not an unusual ritual in families, it is obvious that this greatly impacted her both in her younger and teenage years.

I vividly remember when she was just a toddler finding her perched in her little chair with book in hand reading aloud.   The gibberish that came from her had a cadence that sounded just like someone reading and when she “finished” the page, she would lick her index (or fix-fax finger as she called it) and thumb and proceed to turn the corner of the page and continue her reading.

When she could officially read, it became her favorite pastime and she rarely left home without her latest read tucked under her arm.   Her favorite book was To Kill a Mockingbird and she read it numerous times.   When the Harry Potter series was published, she emersed herself into that world and I witnessed her reading the last page of one of those huge chapter books and see her with it later in the day reading it again!   She longed for the release of the “next” Harry Potter book and she and her dad would always go to Books-A-Million at midnight on the much-anticipated release date, purchase the new one, and she would stay up all night reading until the wee hours of the morning.  She was unlike anyone I had ever known and she would just shrug at my disbelief and did not understand why everyone didn’t love books as she did.

Today, those books she left behind are treasures to me.   The dog-eared pages that marked where she left off, the warped pages from books that got caught by unexpected shifting tides from the beach, and the ones with her special book marks placed in a book that had probably been read numerous times are reminders of her great love of reading.