What the heck's an Oprah?

The thing about growing up on The Mountain without electricity was that we didn’t have certain things. No TV, telephone, or air conditioning. No light switches. No doorbell, no stereo, no curling irons.

What we did have was books. Once every two weeks, our mom would pile the four of us kids into the car and off we’d go to the public library.

To this day, I remember everything about that library. The smell of paper and binding and glue. The short shelves in the kids’ section. The colorful bean bag chairs. The sturdy, hollow ker-thunk of the librarian’s check-out stamp.

We were allowed six books each. I always finished picking mine first. I knew what I liked and I’d return time after time to the same authors, the same sections, and same series.

Our library had tinted front windows that gave it a sort of mysterious fairytale-cave patina. I’d find a quiet spot, and hunker down with my stack of treasures, feeling all cozy and snug and somehow wealthy, as though having a fresh stack of books in front of me was like Scrooge McDuck counting his gold. I’d go through my pile, sorting them and re-reading the covers and stacking them alphabetically, before choosing the one I’d read first.

Back home with our big cloth bags of books, my older sister and I would race to the two best reading spots – comfy chairs near both the wood stove and the big front windows. My little brother and sister would pile their books out onto the floor and read there. One thing was guaranteed – on library day, our mom could count on peace and quiet for the remainder of the afternoon.

In this way, our childhood was spent reading hundreds and hundreds of books. Classics and popular fiction and books about how things are made and mythology and fairy tales and biographies and historical fiction and everything we could get our hands on.

We didn’t watch soap operas, Dynasty, Oprah and Donahue. We didn’t tune into ABC After School Specials. We didn’t watch the evening news.  

And we didn’t miss a thing.