nerdy? reading???

I couldn't help but chuckle when I saw this poster. When I was growing up, summer vacations, to me, meant unlimited time to read. No school to interfere. But in summer, my mother would say--multiple times a day--"Go outside! Don't stay indoors all the time." I know she meant to go outside and do something physical. But I really resented the constraints that such activities made on my reading time. For me, summer meant reading.
So, when she wasn't watching, I stashed books outside or stuck them under my sweatshirt (sorry, raised in Alaska, we wore jackets even in summer) and found places in the woods either on the side or back of my house to sit, my back against a tree trunk, and read. There I was unlikely to be disturbed. It was heaven.  I remember the sounds of birds and breeze accompanying my reading; I remember finishing a book and then looking up at the sky through birch leaves and just thinking about the story and the people I had just experienced through the pages of the book.
I may have been a nerdy girl, but I look back on those days of reading in the trees as idyllic.