A Love Affair With History

On bitter winter nights as a child in Minnesota, I do not recall feeling cold, though there was a quarter-inch of ice on the inside of the windows. I was in love.
I wore footed pajamas under thick blankets with the My Bookhouse Books. Have you seen the them? The covers were a rich, dark green with my real world illustrated on the front. My real world—the one where a knight astride leaned down to accept a rose from…me.
I was transported to different places in my romantic world when I opened the volumes. I might find myself seated on the ground with a Bengal tiger on the other side of the weeping branches of a tree. Dressed in folds of white muslin with a long-ribboned bonnet, I was definitely a girl from long ago and far away. What was I—an English maiden in India? It must have been so. I lingered, looking at the tiger staring back at me. I felt safe. This was my world.
I turned over in bed when I flipped the page so I could lay the book down and hold it open comfortably—and India vanished as I tossed a handful of emeralds from a castle turret somewhere, surrounded by a background of rolling hills with hedge borders parting colored fields…as I remember it. I did not know where that wonderful place could be in my early years, but I was there. I lived there, and I never left. I close my eyes, even now, and smell the lavender in the breeze.
The stories were amazing. When I was caught in a storm on the moors, a dashing prince riding past in his carriage rescued me. He reached out and pulled me from the grasp of a clinging vine and carried me to safety, to deliver me to my lowly home where I had barely a crust of bread to offer. He returned to see me time and again…as I remember it…and then proposed on bended knee. Perhaps I was a long-lost princess? I learned that true love never dies—that we would live happily ever after.

Read the entire article in the October issue of InD'Tale magazine.

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