First Encounters

I can't specifically remember my first experience with literature, because as long as I can remember, I have been surrounded by books. Both of my parents taught English, so they constantly gave my brother and I books to flip through when they couldn't chase after us anymore. I don't remember the feeling of learning to read, I just read. For awhile, my parents didn't know that I actually knew how to read, because I would recite books like Horton Hatches the Egg and Yurtle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss from memory. Soon though, my mom found me out, and she came up with all sorts of games that helped me learn to read and write. One game that I very clearly remember used index cards on which she wrote countless numbers of words that we would lay out on the floor and make sentences with, and then read each other's writing. We kept them in a little plastic jack-o'-lantern on the bottom of the bookshelf, and every time we discovered a word that I had trouble with or didn't know the meaning of, we would add it to the jack-o'-lantern. I took on every book that I came across, so the jack-o'-lantern tended to fill up very quickly. I loved to show off that I could read to everyone, especially my family, and I relished in the praise I got from everyone around me. I think I remember my brother's first experience with reading better than mine because I was so anxious to have someone else my own age who could read with me. We read his first book, The Berenstein Bears in Space, over and over again. Reading was definitely a whole family affair, and my dad loved to read to us at night. When we were about 6 or 7, after I had read the first Harry Potter book on my own, we decided that we would read a chapter every night before going to sleep. I remember staying up and secretly reading farther ahead by my nightlight, entranced by one of the many worlds that books transported me to. Literacy continues to be one of the most important parts of my life, beginning from the second that I discovered the magic of words.