Bookworm
I was six or seven when our parents first began leaving us kids alone. In a tiny town on the vast wheat fields of North Dakota, there wasn’t much shopping to be had, so they went to Grand Forks or Fargo for the day. We could certainly take care of ourselves. We were four little girls, myself the eldest. We could cook on the gas stove; draw, color and cut out paper animals and dolls; play games; and listen to music on a little phonograph. As for me, I had my nose in a book. I remember feeling the hollow in my stomach when our parents were gone. The best way to ignore it was to read, to enter some other world so compelling that when I looked up, I would have to try to remember where I was and what was going on around me. I became known as a “bookworm,” and very soon I had the glasses to prove it! The characters in Little Women or the “Laura and Mary books,” were as real as my sisters. I read and re-read them. But I also found books on the shelves at the back of our grade school...
