Showing posts with label travels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label travels. Show all posts

Monday, July 9, 2012

Summer Armchair Travels

When you say summer reads or beach reading, I don’t think I’ve ever really understood the term.  I   read a book because I wanted to, not because it was a “summer “read.

In the house I grew up in, I had a beach chair under a tree in the back yard, If the tide was  not in, I usually found myself in that seat reading, anything and everything. We lived two blocks from the beach so in the summer, if the tide was in I was at the beach,

Summer was the time I read any and everything I could get my hands on. Just as I did the rest of the year. I just had more time to do it.  I didn’t have school to worry about and even if I had a summer job, it was usually part time.  I have wonderful memories of summers spent reading in my chair in the yard. From that chair I travelled many places.

I went to the wilds of Canada with Mrs. Mike, Nazi Amsterdam with the Diary of Anne Frank, I traveled back in time to colonial Boston, Victorian England  and  the Civil War of the south.

One of my favorite memories was the afternoon I spent reading Gone with the Wind. I took my lunch out to the yard and began reading didn’t stop until my mom called me in for dinner. She said every time she looked out the window I was reading.  I was engrossed in Ashley, Melanie, and of course Rhett. I thought Scarlett was a spoiled little brat. I felt as if I was in the middle of the siege of Atlanta and not in a back yard in Boston. I finished the book that night before going to bed.
So when I hear summer reads I don’t think of lying on the beach but of traveling, even if it’s from my arm chair, Traveling to all the exciting worlds contained in a book.