I am a voracious reader. Books have created me. Books have helped me define my perceptions, my experiences. Books teach me. Books take me places I may not otherwise visit in my lifetime here. They take me to different periods of time. They transport me to farms and homesteads around the world and in various centuries so that I can intern there over cups of tea.

I am always rather surprised when I meet someone who doesn’t read. You don’t read? I think, But where do you… go?”

Why just this week, I was up visiting Tasha Tudor in Vermont in her charming farmhouse, when she was alive, learning to spin and dip candles. Then I grew up in 1902 with a sweet, Jewish immigrant in North Dakota on a fierce homestead, experiencing the Dakota Diaspora. Then I was Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and off to relive the 1980’s with a Vietnamese refugee of my same age. To recall it all through a different set of eyes. Now I might listen to The Last Lecture, or perhaps I will visit England The Summer Before the War. I am on the list to meet Anthony Ray Hinton and hear him tell me about how The Sun Does Shine, even after thirty years falsely accused, sitting on death row.

Oh, the places I will go and the people I will meet! Just think of all the free information, places, and new friends holding space on thick shelves in the library just waiting to be traveled to. I must go.

Between laundry and dishes and throwing scratch to the chickens, I don’t mind a quick trip to Paris, or the South, or to Grand Rapids, or 1864.