Pleasure Dome

I love to read.  In fact, for as long as I can remember, I have surrounded myself with the written word in one form or another.  When I was about eight years old, my dad purchased a set of Collier's Encyclopedias. We started out with 24 volumes, an atlas, a set of ten anthologies, and a yearbook.  Dad even built a great bookcase in the living room where we stored them and used them anytime we wanted.  Christmas vacations would find me curled up on the scratchy mohair couch, reading Hawthorne or Dickens.  One Christmas I read Little Women, and I was hooked.  That set of encyclopedias opened so many opportunities for me.   Books.  Lots of books.  Books that have become my pleasure dome. Never could I imagine then the places I would go in the books that I grew to love.  I have traveled the world!  An ancient wych elm between the garden and the meadow at Howard's End.  A black coal mine where Diamond Skinner will forever be twelve years old.  I am an intimate friend of Valentine Roncalli and Theodora Angelini in the Big Apple, and in my dreams, I slip a pair of their handcrafted-wedding-shoes-since-1903 on my size 6 feet.  I've read every single one of Ivy Rowe's love letters in the hollers of Kentucky.  I've seen Mariam and Laila without the burka, and I've passed the house in Kabul where their vicious abuser is buried in the garden under a tree.  Camel and Jacob, Marlena, Meg, Copper, Edna and Leonce Pontellier.  The names and places roll around in my head like the pieces in a bingo cage.  Grand Isle, I-64, the hills of Virginia, Afghanistan, Sicily, South Africa, England.  Sometimes, when it's very still and I'm alone, I imagine myself in one of those places.  And I have come to realize that there are worse ways to spend a life.