Reader's Digest Redux

Summer of 1968. My mother had packed up us four kids and moved us back to North Dakota, leaving her husband and our father behind in Las Vegas. Purportedly to sell the house, tie up loose ends, take care of other business, and would soon follow us back up north. I didn't expect to see him again, I had learned to have few expectations where my family of origin was concerned. The funny thing is, it didn't feel dismal, it just felt normal. Trading the blistering heat and sand of the Nevada desert for the bitter cold of the northern plains. The five of us moved in with her parents, the duration of these living conditions unknown. My brothers occupied the basement bedroom. It was musty and smelled of moth balls. I'm not sure, but I think my mother slept on the couch in the living room. My sister and I took up residence in the upstairs bedroom. It was bright and sunny with slanted walls that echoed the roofline. I was ten going on eleven and my sister had just turned six. We had shared a bedroom in our house in Nevada but we slept in twin beds, here we were obliged to sleep in the same bed as well as the same room. I didn't mind, I felt safe and above the growing household tensions below. If we had been in twin beds, I think I might have crawled in with my sister just for the comfort of not feeling alone. We had lived in Williston twice before, when I was a baby and when I was in second grade, but to me it was just another new town, another new school where I would have to start all over again. In the fall I would begin sixth grade, but it would be my fifth elementary school in six years. To escape the current state of my life, I read. Anything and everything I could get my hands on, and the upstairs bedroom at Grandma's house was lined by years of back issues of Reader's Digest. I think in the two months we lived there I read them all, six or seven years' worth. And I don't think I picked one up since then. Until last month. My friend Sandy gave me a gift subscription, and the first issue arrived in December. The magazine looks different, brighter and thinner than the sixties version, but the cartoon on the last page looks somehow familiar. And the Word Power feature is just as much fun as I remember. I never would have thought of subscribing to Reader's Digest again, but I'm enjoying having it on my nightstand. Thanks, Sandy, for teleporting me back to an earlier self, to that sunny upstairs bedroom at Grandma's house, where I first realized that reading was fun.