School was out. The long months of summer yawned out before me.
I loved summer. Not because I didn’t have to be dragged out of bed before time, dressed and pushed out to school. Not because there was no homework.
I loved summer because it meant undirected reading. I was free to disappear into whatever books I chose to enter. For as long as I wanted.
Oh, certainly, there was the garden to weed. And maybe a chore or two. But mostly it was time to spend with books.
Now there would always be an interruption of a week for camp and a week for Vacation Bible School. But otherwise, it was long days, long weeks of reading.
In grade school, I consumed all the Hardy Boy and Nancy Drew books. But by junior high, I had been introduced to literature and that is what I dove into.
I confess. I became a snob. I read Shakespeare. My first was “The Merchant of Venice.” I was taken by the language. It had all the grandeur of the King James version of the Bible that I had grown up with.
When I graduated from eighth grade, what I wanted for a present was the complete works of Shakespeare. A wish granted.
I gravitated then towards Russian novels. War and Peace. Anna Karenina. I loved keeping track of who was who. Characters in Russian novels seemed to go by several names.
By high school I was supplied with a college prep reading list. All the great works. Now I knew what I should read. And I dove in. And that included authors like Kafka, Camus, Sartre.

I biked to the library religiously, checked out my allotted books and made my way back to my room to disappear into these other worlds.
Mostly my mother took little notice of what I read. On an occasion or two she peered into the books I had checked out, and declared them unfit. I claimed not yet to have read whatever she found offensive, although most likely I had already poured over the sex scene she found objectionable.
It was summer. I read for love. I read for the words that poured over my parched tongue. I read for the world that I was pulled into, I read for the experiences I had never had. I read for the word.
In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Summer. Sultry, slow days. Cool nights. And the words that trickled through my mind.
And I, making my twice weekly bike to the library for a new stock of words
I was in love with words. With the word.
Life takes so much away from you.
But not today. I have stopped the clock. I have bicycled for miles. I have cracked open a book from the library. And I have fallen in love with words again. (I know. I am a filmmaker, but I still love words.)

Remembering how I loved Tillie Olsen’s short story “I Stand Here Ironing,” I checked out Yonnondido, also by Olsen.
It is a warm day. I am comfortable in a chair and ottoman. I crack the book. The words crack my heart.
The whistles always woke Mazie. They pierced into her sleep like some guttural-voiced metal beast, tearing at her, breathing a terror.
Ahh. Words.
I must confess. I read now mostly for need. For purpose. I read because I must. And I have lost so much.
I have a friend who has a blog focusing on what people are reading. Kathleen, a poet who works at a bookstore, reports on what books people are reading and why.
I’m going to have to let her know that I am being again mesmerized by word and story.
It is summer. The days have stretched out. And I will sneak into those seemingly extra hours, some secret time with words, that like the roots of the seedlings I have planted in my garden, will snake their way around my heart.