Beach Reading

We were going to the beach. So we needed some beach reads.

Not for me, but for my eight-year-old daughter. And not for lounging at the beach, but for driving to the beach. Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts is a long way from Charlottesville, Virginia, especially with a stop in New York City along the way.

The afternoon before departure, we went to the Charlottesville Central Library and found one of the most important people in this town: the children’s librarian. When she suggested familiar books, Ella said, “Don’t you remember? I read that last year,” as if anybody could keep a running list in her head. (I certainly can’t.) Finally, we descended the grand stone stairs with four books (Matilda Bone by Karen Cushman, Night Journey by Avi, A Drowned Maiden’s Hair by Laura Amy Schlitz, and A Girl Named Disaster by Nancy Farmer). Though Ella doesn’t get motion sickness, we also borrowed an audio book (Peter Pan) just in case.

The traffic was horrific. After the seven hours to New York City, what should have been a forty-minute trip from Manhattan to Newark to pick up my in-laws at the airport took hours and involved standing still for more than forty minutes at a time. I found Ella a bathroom downtown, and when we returned, the car hadn’t moved. We worried about running out of gas. But what kept us from screaming at each other and at the unhelpful police officers was our little girl in the back seat, making not a peep about being bored. After all, she had books to read, whose titles, with words like “journey” and “disaster,” seemed wildly appropriate to the situation.

Once we arrived in Martha’s Vineyard, for the family reunion, it was Cousin Time: decorating attic bedrooms with “no grown-ups allowed” signs, collecting dismembered crab carcasses to decorate sand castles, playing hide and seek until dark then poker until the eyes drooped. Halfway through the trip, we visited a charming used books store and bought Ella a pile of paperbacks for the ride home: Mildred Taylor’s The Road to Memphis, Lynne Reid Banks’s The Farthest Away Mountain, Gary Paulsen’s Woodsong, Scott O’Dell’s Streams to the River to the Sea, Avi’s Poppy, and Avi’s Poppy and Rye. When Ella started to read them in the five-minute drive back to the rental house, I had to hide the stash so she would have something fresh to read through the traffic jams we would encounter on our return to Virginia. But she managed to find a cousin’s book (Rick Riordan’s The Red Pyramid), and I wish I had taken a picture of her with two of her eight cousins sprawled on our bed, reading it together.

But I do have these three pictures of reading, two on vacation, and one at home. Every time I look at them, they make me want to pick up a book.