Storytelling Sunday: Better Late than Never

This is my second post of the day, but I wanted to get this episode of Storytelling Sunday up before the link closes on Sian’s blog. I missed last month, and there are only two months left for this year’s theme of “Pick Your Precious.”

When the year began, I made a list of some precious things I knew I wanted to write about. These books were on that list, but I couldn’t find them. This weekend we pulled out a huge box from the attic of the books I saved from my classroom library when I retired. I don’t ever recall using these books at school, but I must have taken them there for some purpose. I’m delighted to have found them.

E. B. White has been a favorite author since I was a child. Stuart Little was published three years before I was born, but my copy was purchased in 1953. My mother’s inscription indicates it was bought in Chicago, probably on one of the many trips we made between Kansas (where we lived) and our relatives in Ohio.

I was four years old when Charlotte’s Web was published. Four seems a bit young for Charlotte’s Web, but my father read The New Yorker every week, and E.B. White was regularly published there. Thanks to my father, I have a first edition copy.

My parents inscribed my name and often the date in every book they purchased for me, and I have tried to do the same for my children and grandchildren.

I wish I had inherited my mother’s beautiful script handwriting! As important as these books are to me, what they represent more than anything is the love of reading my parents instilled in me. My father read aloud to us nearly every night, and continued to read articles and short stories aloud to me even when I was in my forties! 

Here’s a scrapbook page I made a few years ago that celebrates that love.

And here, on this Christmas Journal page from 2008, is a photo of my father reading to my brother and me at Christmas time in our apartment in Hays, Kansas.

It’s clear that Charlotte’s Web needs a bit of repair and I need to investigate how to do that without ruining the value of the first edition, but it’s never going to be sold. I know for sure, Sarah will be happy to acquire it for her already large collection of children’s books. She’s a more avid reader than I am, and Caleb’s first phrase was, “read book.” It’s a good sign.