Fair’s Fair “For Book Lovers”

The Treasured World of Reading by Laura Best

The Treasured World of Reading

There was excitement in our little community the day the bookmobile rumbled down the dirt road for the first time, all the way from the Annapolis Valley some thirty miles away. At that time, there was little in the way of services offered to small communities in Nova Scotia so, for all of us, this was indeed a very big deal. Walking about a mile and a half to wait for the bookmobile seemed a small price to pay even on a hot day in July.
My sisters and I gathered at the community hall along with some of our neighbours, each of us knowing that we were all waiting for the same thing and, when the bookmobile pulled up and stopped, we anxiously climbed aboard. Even to this day I can recall how the smell of all those books permeated the inside of the bus as I stepped onto the carpeted floor. I was in heaven!
Mum had given us suggestions of books we might want to look for, ”Kilmany of the Orchard,” ”Beautiful Joe,” and “Black Beauty,” were on the top of her list; books she had read and enjoyed as a young girl in Halifax. At the age of nine, Mum left behind her home in rural Nova Scotia to attend the Halifax School for the Blind, as the public school system at that time was not equipped to deal with children who were visually impaired. As one of the saving- sight students, Mum did not learn to read Braille but instead, was able to chose books from the school library. Having experienced the joy of being able to read printed words from a book, no one understood more than she the pleasure that goes along with being able to hold a book, flip through the pages and read the words, something that many of us take for granted.
For many years, in the drawer of Mum’s dresser, was a pocket novel she had since before she was married. I used to sneak the book from out of the drawer and flip through the pages. I was mesmerized by the sketched pictures of Dick Tracey and Tess Trueheart in this little book even before I was old enough to decipher many of the words.
As I grew older I would bring books home from our school library for Mum to read to my younger brother and I. Starting off with the Bobbsey Twins, over the course of time, we progressed to Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Curled up on Mum’s bed, my brother and I would hang on Mum’s every word, waiting for our favourite sleuths to solve a new mystery. And when we’d beg for another chapter, when it was time to set the book down, Mum would usually give in. I’m sure she was equally anxious to find out what would happen next.
One Christmas we received a big book of stories and poems; one for each day of the year, with the month and day marked on the upper right-hand corner. A few years back Mum came across it in her attic and presented it to me. The covers have long since disappeared as well as some of the stories, but to me it is still a valued treasure. How fortunate I am that this love of reading Mum acquired so early on in her life, despite the visual challenges she faced, was passed down to me and how fortunate I feel that her limited vision did not deter her from discovering a whole realm of worlds that lies waiting between the crisp clean pages of a soon to be read book.

Bio:

I have lived in the community of East Dalhousie, Nova Scotia, all my life and to this day the bookmobile still makes its rounds. My fiction has been published in literary magazines such as Grain, The Antigonish Review and Room to name a few. I have written several articles for Coastal Community News, a small publication that reports the happenings in rural communities in Nova Scotia. I also have a piece forth coming in an anthology being published by Red Deer Press in the fall of 2008 and I was a contributor to Christmas in the Maritimes, an anthology published by Nimbus.