Bookmobile

I have always loved to read. My love of books started when I was a small child, listening to  my mother read Peter Rabbit and poems from Robert Louis Stevenson’s  A Child’s Garden of Verses, . Later, as I learned to read on my own, I could not get enough of the printed word.

Summers were a challenge as an avid reader. Without the school library to feed my hunger for reading, I often tried to decipher one of the many Book of the Month Club volumes relegated to bookshelves in our basement. This was not a successful accomplishment. The public library was not an easy option. Our family only had one car for most of my childhood (this was the 1960s after all). Although my mother was home during the day, the car was my dad’s transportation to work. So trips to the library were infrequent.

One of the highlights during the summer reading drought was the town’s bookmobile that would come to our rural neighborhood. I waited impatiently for this library on wheels to visit our neighborhood every other Tuesday afternoon. My sister, brother, and I would join other neighborhood children as we entered at one end and later, books in hand, exited from the other end.

I don’t know whose idea was this marvelous metal monstrosity on wheels. But I’m sure it saved the reading lives of many a child and adult!