I just popped in to see what everyone is reading now, and noticed that no one has posted since 02/26!

Sooooo, you get a story to help you think of something to post!

I learned how to read when I was two years old. I didn't learn to read print, I learned how to read braille.

My oldest brother is blind. He is three years older than I am, and he started school at Perkins School for the Blind back in the early sixties, before public schools were required to provide education for blind children.

He came home with his new schoolbooks and I was fascinated that he could tell me a story by touching dots. He could read in the dark!! He taught me how to read them!! I could read in the dark now too!!

My next older brother went off to school the next year. He came home with his new books and they had pictures and letters! He taught me how to read them!

At 4 years old I was reading anything I could get my hands on. The principal at the school I was in found out the new kindergarten kid could read. Every day I went to his office for an hour and he would let me pick out any book I wanted from his shelf and read it. The only catch was I had to read it out loud to him. We shared stories every day for an hour while the rest of my class took a nap! It continued in first grade with longer stories.

He had treasures on his shelves, leather bound classics with gold embossed lettering for titles and gilt edged pages! Books with short stories, poetry, fiction, adventure, travel! I read a chapter a day to him and we made it through some good books! I learned how to leave the place I was and live in the stories I was reading.

Now in the summer, I get the absolute pleasure of spending time with my neices and nephews, godchildren and adopted family. Some of them have children of their own. We read together and they read aloud to me. There's nothing like a child with a book in front of a crackling fire in a hundred year old cabin, smelling the aged pages, opening the book, and disappearing into the world contained within.

They come back as they age, and they look for their favorite books and pick them up and read them again and again. They bring more books and leave them behind for the next generation. You can go from a 1917 Mother West Wind book to a new copy of Everybody Poops!, Ray Bradbury to Harry Potter, Zane Grey to Robert Frost. We write in the flyleaf, sign our names and what character we were when we read the book...

I've often wished I could thank all the people who gave me this gift, who took the time to pass on the love of reading to me, who taught me how to travel to far places by opening a book. While writing this, I've realized that maybe I have done just that.