Initially, books were bright colors and mysterious pictures, objects that I tried to understand through how they felt in my mouth or the sounds I could make by tearing the pages.  As I became more aware, I was enthralled by the way my mother could take these colorful square wonders and turn them into song and story.  The pictures slowly changed from random collections of images to illustrations of what my mother told me as she looked at them. 

I finally began to understand that the letters, what had appeared to be accidental groupings of the ABCs that she taught me to sing, meant something.  The stories were there in the letters.  Then, my mother told me the most wonderful thing of all, that what she was doing, this act of magic, was called reading and she could teach it to me.  Since then, books have been an essential and enduring part of my life.

 

© Salahub 2003