Sorry for the delay in posting. The last two weeks have been more than hectic with the end of the semester. My last thing isn’t due until tomorrow, but I saw a news report about the Taliban attack on a school and I decided publish something more uplifting. Something that is proof that the world is not just full of darkness.

My sister and I walk to the library. It is a nice day with a blue sky and sunshine.
At one point, we cross a driveway. We think the car is going to stop for us, but it jerks forward at the same time that we start walking. “Always try to make eye contact,” my sister tells me as she grabs my arm.
She heads right for the reserved shelf. I want to peruse the young adults section, but I already have a few books from the last time we were here in my room. She finds the bright green paper that proclaims our last name in black permanent marker and pulls the book that we had chosen together off the shelf. It’s Pride and Prejudice.
It starts to rain while we are checking out using the new “do it yourself” system. We walk quickly out of the library and down the hill. My sister tucks the book under her coat to keep it safe. No cars bother us.
We are both cold and fairly wet when we duck into a restaurant. We are eating later, so we just order two hot chocolates and sit in the slightly comfortable chairs in the corner next to the fireplace, which is thankfully turned on.
My sister suggests starting the book and I lean over as she reads the famous first sentence: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
Always mindful of the time, I allow her to finish the first two chapters before I say that we should be going; we have a movie to catch.
It is yet again sunny and bright outside as we walk over the highway to the dine-in movie theater that is a few blocks away from my house.
One half of the theater is dimmed and the other still has its lights on full power. My sister and I sit in the lighted side and order one Mushroom and Swiss Burger each. While we wait for the food to come and the movie to start, she pulls out Jane’s Austen’s work. She gets through half a chapter before the lights start to dim.
“I guess they don’t want me reading out loud,” she says as she closes the book

Pride and Prejudice wasn’t the first or the last book we read together. First, we read The Hobbit. Some of the reading took place on the hammock in our backyard. One chapter was read in the dark with a flashlight. And in middle school, she would pick me up after school and we would walk home where sardines and crackers would wait with our latest book. We read A Great and Terrible Beauty and Timothy Zahn’s Dragonback series.

While my sister was reading, I would sink into her voice and all thought would be suspended temporarily as I crawled into the minds of the characters. And throughout all these experiences, I would be happy. Because you see, books are love.