My little brother is watching Little House On the Prairie in the living room right now. I heard the music come on from where I was washing the dishes in the kitchen and the wells began. The kind that just begin stinging lightly behind your eyeballs, enough so that blinking a few times is adequate, at least enough to make them stop and for you to look like less of a fool.
I can never figure out whether I cry around Little House because it reminds me of being small and curled on the sectional couch in the library of our old house, my mother reading The Long Winter and my eight year old heart breaking when the Ingalls had no food and than when finally the barrel came, in the immense relief I felt. Or whether I cry because every day for six or seven years after school I would turn on channel 69 and transfer myself somehow to the 1800's prairie, to a little too small, clapboard house and a horse all my own called Bunny. Every life lesson, every monument in my life, every hurdle - big or small - has somehow been equated to that lifestyle, that life I never could call my own. Or at least if it wasn't Little House, it was Anne of Green Gables.
Perhaps I cry because I remember a time when every night my mother would read to us. Every night. It was then, before I knew that I could read them on my own, that I learned to appreciate the written word, even if it was only spoken at that point. Her voice getting tired, and our voices begging for 'just one more chapter?' We'd offer to get her a drink of water and she'd concede whether we did or not. Did she enjoy it? I don't know, I'm not sure even now whether it was our joy that kept her going or her love of reading to us. Michael read Watership Down on tape and sent it to me when I had mono at age 14. I still have it. Why? Because I was hearing the voice of someone I loved, reading to me something I loved, and it was an act of sacrifice that I loved.
It was those nights and late afternoons that I first heard of C.S. Lewis' Narnia, and J.R.R. Tolkeins Lord of The Rings. It was than that I experienced Sayers mysteries and MacDonalds fairy tales, so that when I grew to be 14 and 17 I learned to appreciate Chestertons Man Who Was Thursday and O'Conners Everything that Rises Must Converge. It is the memory of stormy nights, the power out, wrapped in afghans my grandmother knitted, the oil lamp working to produce enough light to illuminate the words - my mother's voice working to produce enough light to illuminate the passion, that cements in my mind. It is the memory of homework sitting unfinished on the table, sums and formulas waiting until we found out what happened to Shasta and Bree. The memory of a sink full of dishes and a lawn to be mowed and a parent who complied to our need to conclude the Last and Final Battle. It was than that I first heard The Giver, the book which began my thirst to see a world full of peace and finality. Than that I understood that Anne's preteen hormonal imbalance wasn't hormonal at all, but a personality that one can only learn to love.
When I first returned home from college in 99, I read to my brothers every night. We finished Narnia once again, read Bible stories that I had been familiar with, but to them were only new and fresh since they weren't in a church at the time. We curled on my bed, one dark haired on one side and one tow head on the other, wrapped in my down quilt and read. Sometimes they would fall asleep and I'd let them spend the night in my bed with me, sometimes they would stay awake and beg for 'Just one more chapter?' And sometimes I would close the book and look at them looking at me and we would wait patiently for the next night - our time to love one another in a make believe world.
