Mother’s Day Extra: Rooms of our own
My Mom taught me to read early. As the youngest of six, I was tossed into the deep end of a family of readers. I would gleefully spend hours with my Dr. Seuss and yes, Dick and Jane, books long before I started Kindergarten. Our house was filled with hardbacks and paperbacks, magazines and newspapers (two a day!).
We had stacks of books that spilled from bookshelves onto end tables, books in our dining room and, of course, books in our bedrooms. When I was in elementary school, summers meant weekly trips to Kmart with my Mom, and, if she had enough spending money left over for the week, a new Nancy Drew book for me. Those were in addition to the attic full of book series my elder siblings had left behind: Cherry Ames, Judy Bolton, the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins.
I became such a bookworm, so intent on my own reading, that I never thought much about what my Mom read. Between laundry, cleaning and cooking for a husband and six kids, when would she even have time to read?
Still, she had her own stacks. Erma Bombeck was a favorite — I remember her laughing out loud whenever she read passages by the funny Ohio housewife with a wholesome heart and deadpan delivery. Norman Vincent Peale was another classic — I remember my Mom extolling the virtues of positive thinking so much that I became an early and relentless optimist.
