The Chapters of our Lives

Reading is huge. It really is huge.

 

My cousin really thought that reading was important. She would buy me tons of books. And she wrote her name in them, and the year, so they said things like “Merry Christmas Tammi, 1975.” I loved reading, and she loved reading, so it was just this bond we had. She was around 25 when she started to send the books, and it started when I was about two or three years old. What was different back then was people didn’t know how important reading was. My cousin just knew she loved to read.

When I had my first child, we were all about reading. When my kids were younger, we would take a day where we would get up, and we would go to story time at the library. And after story time, we would leave, and we would go to Diamond Park, and we would have a picnic. We would just sit and talk, or we’d read the books that we got, and then we would walk around town a little bit. Those were such fun days.

We started going to the library when my kids were really little. The first time I brought them, they were probably two or so, and they were all over the place. So I scooped them up and we left. We didn’t come back for about a year. So when they were around three and could actually sit, we took them back, and they loved the puppet show. And this continued up through middle school, coming to the library and getting books. Through high school, not as much. But even last summer, my daughter, who is 33, said, “Should we go get some books from the library?”
 

Even this fall,  my son brought his girlfriend home from college and wanted to walk around Meadville together. And I thought, that’s really sweet. He wanted to meet me and my husband at Cup n’ Spoon. So we go and meet them down at Cup n’ Spoon and start walking around. When we got to Diamond Park, he stopped and said, “This is where, when I was younger, we used to have picnics after the library.” It was a nice, relaxing, lazy day that really meant a lot.  It’s just been a staple in our lives.