One of my most vivid childhood memories was the day I got my first library card. I was 7 years old. The public library was one mile from my home and I was allowed to walk there by myself. Mind, this was back in the 1940s when no one worried about children being abducted. I remember spending a lot of time in that library. Practically from the start all I wanted to read were books about girls, both fiction and nonfiction. And I wouldn't read any book that didn't have at least one picture. Words by themselves looked awfully dry to me. "Little Women" and "The Bobbsey Twins" were my early favorites. I never did get into the Nancy Drew mysteries, probably because she was my older sister's favorite. It's like Carolyn owned Nancy Drew and I owned the Bobbsey Twins. Because I was a second child, I identified most closely with Flossie and Freddie, the younger of the two sets of twins. Besides they had curly blonde hair and mine was curly and what was called "strawberry blond." When I outgrew the Bobbsey Twins, all I wanted to read were biographies of women. That's when my lifelong desire to go to India was born. One of the biographies was of an Indian woman, and her life fascinated me. I still want to go there.

The other library in my early life was the Anne Arundel County Library Bookmobile. From 1947-62, my family rented a cottage on the Rhode River, an inlet off the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. Our cottage was one of seven owned by Ma Schultz, and all the families liked to read. So every other Monday afternoon during the summer months, the bookmobile would make its way down our crushed oyster shell driveway and park in front of the Boyle's cottage. Each of us kids was given ten minutes to find the eight books we were allowed to take out for two weeks. I went through every single book they had on the lives of girls and women. I can still see myself on the screened porch, reading for hours every day while stretched out on that old rope-and-wood chaise lounge with its flowery vinyl cushions that always stuck to my sweaty bare legs.

So what are your library memories?