Pale skin. Grey eyes. Long hair knotting in the wind. Gazing out over the ocean, wistful and longing. This is how I imagined my 11-year old self, elbows resting on the railing, overlooking the private courtyards of downtown Padua. Kit Tyler knew how I felt. What it was like to leave everyone you loved. What it was like to move far away. What it was like to not fit in.

I spent hours on our apartment balcony, slowly working through the injustices of my Dad’s sabbatical. My Mom’s insistence I go to an Italian-only speaking school. The simultaneous romance of the adventure and isolation of being functionally silenced.

I’d brought six books; all required reading to advance to 7th Grade when I got back to Ohio. Our little trio must have read each one a dozen times. The burnt orange cover of Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond marked our attention in fuzzy cream lines, the paperboard cracking through the film.

Although I didn’t want to give my Mom the satisfaction, at school I learned Italian and made friends. Julia and I would walk arm-in-arm for la patatine fritte after class. Sing duets to Paula Abdul. My “boyfriend” Luca looked just like Macaulay Culkin with gold wire-rimmed glasses.

As hard as it was integrating into Italian life - switching sneakers for monk shoes, learning to laugh off the ever-hopeful “Ciao Bella!” - I ended up needing Kit more once I got home. Childhood friends had moved on. New romances and alliances had formed. I had grown, too.

I cried when I returned to Padua a decade later. The city was grittier than I remembered. From the street, our balcony looked smaller, cruddier. Not the windswept cliff I’d envisioned myself standing on so many silent afternoons, hoping a ship and the Captain’s son would save me too.

In the years between, I’d moved six times. Always going, then returning. Five countries. Each time casting new friends, then leaving again for an increasingly foreign home. What would Kit do? Create home in people. Look for the outliers. Belong with the people who don’t belong.

Last week, a friend died from Covid. As I told my husband of his shyness, his kindness, I felt heat wave up my spine. A warmth of homecoming. All these years, I’d wished to fit in. To be part of a community. Now here, unnoticed, in the margins of my greater acts, I’d gathered a heart family, connected to each other by both circumstance and choice. Kit’s final realization became my own: “It was not escape that she had dreamed about, it was love”.

“The 100 Dresses” was the first book that changed me. It was about an impoverished little girl who is teased by her classmates for wearing the same dress every day, and who defends herself by saying, ”I have one hundred dresses lined up in my closet!” When she is forced to move, again, out of poverty, they find one hundred beautiful drawings of dresses lined up in her closet. I cried myself to sleep worrying about poor people and brave little girls, wondering if my imagination might help save me, too.

Discovering my neighbors had the complete set of Nancy Drew books, I was able to “check out” seven or eight books at a time, lasting only a day or two, if I played “horsey,” with their plastic-horse-obsessed daughters, who made me “neigh” and ride them all over their yard. I enjoyed a more sophisticated Barbie doll existence, with great conversation and outfit changes, so I really earned those books. When I stepped into the world of Nancy, George, Ned and even (now UN-PC) “pleasantly plump” Bess, I didn’t hear my parents fighting, and could at least change something somewhere.

When I ran out of Nancy Drew, I found another girl detective series at the grocery store. There weren’t many in the set, but Trixie Beldon was a normal girl who helped her family with their farm, not rich like Nancy with all the time in the world. I realized I was middle class, like Trixie, and that I could still right wrongs in my spare time. Her best friend, Honey, was rich but didn’t know much about real life, and Trixie helped her with that. It was okay that my home life was hard. It made me a better person.

Marion Zimmer Bradley taught me feminism through Arthurian legends, Elena Ferrante validated the intesity of my female relationships, Toni Morrison taught me about lifelong grief, Jeannette Walls and Curtis Sittenfeld mirrored my life, and Colson Whitehead almost convinced me there was a literal Underground Railroad. David Sedaris’ writing has helped me many times, especially when my first cat, Rodney, was dying and needed to be put down. I was laughing and crying as I made the most adult decision of my life.

I have suffered from debilitating depression for too great a portion of my life, and when I’ve most wanted to die, I’ve picked up a book about someone else’s life and been spirited out of my own. Understanding someone else as a way to free us from ourselves. Less escapism than necessity, reading has also freed me from the curiousities of my yet-to-be understood brain.

I have almost nightly stepped into the shoes of people all over the world, experiencing their hopes and hardships, candor and cruelty, hoping to further my understanding of humanity. I believe history classes would be more effective if told through personal stories instead of textbooks. I find it harder to forget suffering and injustice when I know someone through a book.

On long summer afternoons I often laid on my bed, careful not to muss the bedspread. The curtains at the window rustled slightly with a faint breeze, unusual during the daytime but ever present at night. My outfit was usually cotton shorts and some kind of sleeveless blouse or maybe a T-shirt, and I was always barefoot. My hair was in the pixie cut my mother preferred. I knew I could not grow it long until I was old enough to wash it myself and get the tangles out without pouting. I propped both pillows behind my head as I plucked my current book from the top of my bureau.

Outside the window my mother was hanging clean laundry on the line or picking sweet peas or green beans in the garden. I couldn’t hear her except when she spoke to Terrence as he crouched in the grass hunting for moles or field mice. The sound of Mr. Mollison driving his John Deere tractor in the field behind the house created a low rumble. The longer he drove, the more fragrant the air became from the clover he was threshing.

The book I took from my bureau was often a mystery, maybe Nancy Drew or the Happy Hollisters. Sometimes I read a biography of some famous woman we had studied in school that year. Clara Barton was a great favorite, although I knew already, I would never become a nurse – too squeamish and likely to exhibit every symptom of every disease. As the afternoon wore on, the sticky air became more even more dense, making it hard for me to breathe. Sometimes I spent the entire afternoon on my bed, finishing one book and starting another.

Soon enough my mother called from the kitchen, “Kathy, it’s your turn to set the table.” I reluctantly placed my bookmarker inside the book and returned it to the bureau. My other life beckoned, and I was again the youngest daughter, bound to her chores. Torn away from the real life I wanted one day to live.

Carefully stepping into overgrown grass gone to seed, I lifted the leg of my pants. Royalty always elevates a skirt before moving through the thicket by foot. Regardless of whether this act may result in a tidy hemline. It is expected. Navigating around burdock, the car keys shifted in my pocket. I grasped my thigh and pressed the metal into my leg. Hard. I’ve sworn an oath to maintain the safety of these keys. The only ones known to open a portal to another world.

I eyed my destination. The entire frame of the old grey barn shifted more each year. The structure leaned alarmingly to one side. Decades had passed since the last of the dairy cows were sold off and farm equipment auctioned. I pretended to use one of the car keys to open a side door. They clinked softly as I returned them to my pants pocket. I forced the wooden barn door closed behind me. The stillness was sublime. The air thick with the rich sweet scent of hay. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply.

Where are you, my siblings? I must be released from this prison of an existence. I must find the door to Narnia.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis provided escape from the world I inhabited. The youngest of four children, I did my best to avoid my parent’s proximity and drug fueled violence. I’d roam the rural land for hours searching for the door. Entire days hidden in the woods of the Adirondacks, dense with trees, the ground obscured by plant growth. Miles of shale riverbed hiked and explored. As the season’s heat waned, I’d open milkweed pods and pile downy seeded strands at my feet. Eventually releasing them to the wind.

I would grieve the loss of summer until she returned.

Harsh winters forced almost all time to be spent indoors. Relying on books for strength, I turned to them more. Borrowed from friends and school libraries. Hidden under pillows. I devoured them during long nights locked in my childhood bedroom. Praying for moonlight sufficient to read by, I hoped to continue hours after the house fell silent.

I recognized characters. The insurmountable obstacles they faced. Beloved protagonists would misstep and at times intentionally hurt others. Individuals capable of selfless and cruel behavior. Motivated by fear and pain. Worthy of forgiveness.

My books gave me a means to briefly elude my reality. To access desperately needed respite. To discover characters resembling those I’d been hurt by. Like those I hurt. To find myself in the pages and grant her grace.

Now with three young children myself, I relish their request, “Tell us a tale Mommy! One we haven’t heard before!”

Completely immersed in story, losing sense of time and place, my boys intently focus on my words. I am filled with gratitude. I lead them to the secret door to another world. Together, we go through.

I was drowning and I didn’t mind. Maybe I was ten, maybe I was twelve, but Where the Red Fern Grows had me by the neck and held me under its well of words. I read the book, then I read it again, each time drowning in letters on the page and tears by the time I reached the last of it. I named the first dog, a beagle, I ever bought for myself, Ol’ Dan. He snorted, was fat, he never hunted, but daily he reminded me of that book.

When younger than that, I lived in a neighborhood that had an ice cream truck and a bookmobile. The ice cream truck meandered our streets daily in the summer; it’s bell, heard blocks away, made my sister and me scramble for change, search under couch pillows, and beg our parents for treats. The bookmobile didn’t visit as often, maybe once a week or two, and although my sister was less enthusiastic, I raced around in the same fashion, gathering borrowed books to return so I could pick new ones.

The outside of the van had imaginary landscapes, Seussian characters, Puff the Magic Dragon, and flying carpets emblazoned on its sides. Inside was a dimly lit heaven. Shelves and shelves of bungeed books, a carpet with flattened roads and flattened buildings, green stars meant to be trees, and a small table, two chairs. My mother sat folded in a chair patiently, while my sister and I looked and looked until I finally picked two new books. I wanted to be a bookmobile driver when I grew up so I could borrow books anytime I wanted.

There was the town library, too. My first official signature in script was scrawled across the bottom of my first library card. That card opened worlds for me. In the books I borrowed, I saw myself, I saw the selves I could be, I saw the selves I would never be, but was glad to meet. I shook hands with each hero and each villain alike, taking what I could from them, borrowing (or stealing) wherever I wanted. I was a thief of words.

They danced in my head everywhere I went, and when I didn’t have a book, those words made for playmates that I could spend time with when my friends weren’t available. With them I created my own stories, my own worlds. Those words kept me up at night, visited me in my dreams, made dramatic appearances in my backyard and played house in my room. As a child, I spent much of my time swimming out in the ocean depths of words inside me, floating, drowning, and I didn’t mind.