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In 4th grade, after a school-wide vision screening administered between milk break and math, I learned I needed glasses. Badly. This was news to me, I guess because you don't know what you don't know, but when the eye doctor finally slid those pink glasses onto my face a few weeks later and spun his stool out of the way, my whole world crisped into unprecedented clarity.
"Ohhhhhh," I said. "That's what everything looks like."
My parents joked that I'd made it that far not noticing how blurry the outside world was because I always had my nose in a book. I question the veracity of the next part of this story, because it seems odd that an eye doctor would dispense this advice — or at the very least I trust that it was misconstrued — but my parents say he advised I do less reading and more playing. "Get outside and climb a tree," he allegedly said.
Later that day, as the story goes, my parents found me up in a tree in the backyard — reading a book.
Maybe that's why I think of summer as outdoor reading season. These last weeks of May and early weeks of June can be so exquisite in Wisconsin, the air that magical alchemy of lingering cool pressure and gentle warming, not yet unbearably humid or thick with mosquitoes. And the green, everywhere green; lush new growth returning to life before the weeds rise up in rebellion.
I still think there's no sweeter sight than a book framed by a tree canopy, viewed swinging from a hammock. I don't remember the last time I climbed a tree, but my youngest daughter and I have been going up to Brigham County Park with our camping hammocks and our novels. We give each tree a hug as we wrap the straps around, then settle into our respective nests, sweetly swaying. Lately, in these scenarios, I end up reading the same paragraph over and over because I'm so distracted by the glorious hiss and shush of the leaves above, and how life cycles back on itself year after year, and how swiftly we go from being fourth graders to parents of fourth graders to parents whose kids are going forth into the big, wide world, and how even when you can see with 20-20 vision (or hindsight), there's so much ahead you can't ever see coming. This is the last summer my daughter and I will be able to do this whenever we want — she's graduating in a week and leaving for college at the end of August, and everything is changing the way it always does, except for everything that stays the same, like a good book on a sweet and mild summer day, glasses on, a lifetime of stories left to unfold.
Maggie Ginsberg is a senior editor at Madison Magazine and author of the novel, "Still True," which is the honorable mention selection for the 2022 Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and a 2023 Midwest Book Awards honoree. She curates this monthly newsletter for Madison Magazine. Reach her at mginsberg@madisonmagazine.com.
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