One summer, a door – and then books, and then a new world – opened

Miss Louise lived in a stone Tudor that rose high among a stand of ancient elms. Thick green ivy crept over the front walls and traced the leaded glass windows. A curved walkway led from the same winding street where my grandparents lived to her looming front door – sturdy oak, darkened with age, and straight out of a fairy tale. Inside, oak paneled walls gleamed over floors clad in Persian rugs, and the clean smell of beeswax furniture polish hung in the still air.All I cared about, though, was the library at the back of the house.Every summer, I stayed with my grandparents for several weeks. I was the youngest of three girls, and my absence gave my parents some breathing room and let me be thoroughly spoiled by my mother’s doting mom and dad. Decades before computers or smartphones, when cable television was not even a gleam in some investor’s eye, summertime was the chance to dive into and lose myself in books. But my grandparents’ shelves were crammed with gardening, cooking, and inspirational books, along with Reader’s Digest condensed hardbacks – slim pickings for a girl with a ravenous imagination.Miss Louise invited me to come to her house anytime, she said, to see if there was anything in their library I might like to borrow. Her four children were all grown, she told me, and the poor books just sat there on the shelves with no girls or boys to read them.In answer to my timid knock, the massive door swung open and Miss Louise, with her pink face and curly white hair, greeted me with a sweet smile. In her low, quiet voice, she invited me inside, and I followed her through the wide foyer and down the hall, my bare feet scuffing on the rugs, on into the library, where I fell as quiet as if I were entering a church. Books filled the shelves from floor to ceiling. One inhale of the fragrance of paper, cloth covers, and glue, and suddenly anything became possible – any world, anytime, anyplace. I was allowed to take four books at a time. Miss Louise sometimes helped me choose, and after I’d made my selections, she sat me in an overstuffed chair in the front room and padded off to the kitchen, returning with two cookies and a glass of cold milk. While I sat with my snack, she talked softly – about how much I’d grown since last summer; about her grandchildren who lived far away; about her husband, Joe, who was shy and liked to stay upstairs; and sometimes about her latest gardening projects.After our visit, I hugged my books, remembering to say, “Thank you, ma’am.” I hurried up my grandparents’ steep driveway and into the house, racing upstairs to the dormer alcove that served as my bedroom, and flopped onto the narrow cot where I stayed for hours, transported.The summer I was 11 years old, I read “Joy and Pam at Brookside,” about teenage girls who traveled by train to boarding school, which, for a girl who lived on a farm in rural Ohio, seemed the most glamorous thing I could think of. I read about children who wore muslin clothing and wool stockings and took a pony cart to a picnic, where they were stung by hornets. A “Bobbsey Twins” book about a winter snow lodge left me chilled even as the humid summer air swirled in through the screened window.In the way that happens as we leave childhood behind, I don’t recall the last time I borrowed books from Miss Louise. One summer, I made a friend, a girl my age who lived down the street, and we spent hours playing jacks and pick-up-sticks on the cool concrete floor of my grandparents’ screened-in porch. Another summer, my grandmother found a few day camps, and my parents discovered a sleepaway camp where I could ride horses.Later, I brought my own fat paperbacks and long novels. If I saw Miss Louise in her garden, I’d wave hello, and she’d smile and wave back. I don’t remember when they sold their Tudor house and moved, but one summer I arrived to find someone else living there. Ten years ago, I visited the old neighborhood, coasting over the rough pavement, feeling the tug of days gone by. Miss Louise’s house was, of course, smaller than I remembered. The leaded glass windows had been replaced with energy-efficient casements. The front entrance featured a bright, smaller door. Gone was the creeping ivy, and with it, the thrilling darkness.Still, when summer heat clings and the leaves forget to quiver, I’m drawn back to that house, into its shadowy coolness and the room full of wonders, where a woman I knew for only several weeks out of a year saw into me and opened a door that has never closed.I was a reader who became a writer. My own children loved to read, lying on their beds beneath a warm breeze, bare feet propped against a wall, pages turning like whispers. Now they are grown, and I have a preschool-age granddaughter. My daughter began reading to her when she was a baby. Already, she is trying to sound out letters, falling in love with words, with books. Deepen your worldviewwith Monitor Highlights.Politics with respectGet political stories with respectful analysis.There‘s a world of new ideas in everyBooks newsletter.There‘s more to life, enrich yours withCulture & Learning weekly.Follow humanity‘s discoveries withScience & Nature stories in your inbox.Gain a spiritual perspectivefrom the stories in your inbox.Want to understand the deeper impact of critical events? Learn the Monitor‘s insight.Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads. I think about Miss Louise and how she’ll never know her gift to me, passed down through generations. Or maybe she did, and that was part of the reason for her sweet, knowing smile each time I saw her.These days, I sit on my front porch with the sun at my back and a book in my hands. I read the first word, the first line, the first page – a toe, a foot, and then I am all the way in the story – through the doorway to other lives, other worlds, while the white wicker chair melts away beneath me. 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