Twilight in the Library

Reluctantly, my three sons joined me in our library this evening to begin Okay for Now. I prefaced the reading with a few reminders of how Holling Hoodhood's father treated him. I confessed that after the first six pages, I almost did not want to read another page of the book.

After reading those six pages aloud to them, I stopped and looked at their somber faces, imagining a father as cruel and sarcastic as Mr. Swieteck. They listened intently as they pictured The Dump, Doug Swieteck's new house in Marysville, New York, as they pictured the marble steps of the public library. When Doug discovered "The Arctic Tern, Plate CCL" in the library's upstairs loft, we looked back again to the reproduction of Audubon's work.

The magic of reading aloud is never lost, even to high school and college students, thank goodness. As I read in the twilight, they were drawn in to the story, just as I was. We will spend evenings in the next weeks together in our library and in Marysville.