'Why does everything need to be labeled?' or 'Summer in the City'

To me, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is two things. It is a love story to Brooklyn and it is a love story about reading. Now, when I first read Betty Smith's classic book I connected with her main character Francie Nolan. For a few weeks I insisted to my mother that she call me Francie, tried to climb the trees in my backyard and went on a kick where I visited the library everyday after school. I reread that book this summer and fell in love again with its beautiful story.

At one point in the story I was so awed by one quote that I literally placed the book in my lap while I tried to regain the air in my lungs-

"Because," explained Mary Rommely simply, "the child must have a valuable thing called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which to live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then, when this world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination."

This morning I climbed out of bed and filled an over sized mug with powerfully strong coffee. I got my brother out of bed and made sure he was settled in front of the TV singing along to Diego before I went back down to my room to retrieve my book. Then, I began a routine which has been a part of every summer for as long as I can remember. I curled up on my couch and began to get lost in a new world.

The summer is a time where I could travel through whichever books I choose. I was a lonely kid and the summer only ever meant a lack of schoolwork for me. I could disappear in any corner of my house I could steal and read till I was found. But it was in these summers that I built block by block the world I now use to escape to just as Mary Rommely intended.

I looked around the walls of my room this morning and saw my collected books. My father has been bothering me for years to get rid of them. He wants me to essentially dig through my childhood and tell him what I can live without. I don't know how to explain to him that I can't.

But those books, the ones I read in the summers, are the ones that I remember most clearly. Those are the books which I have read multiple times, the books which even now I am tempted to take with me to school. They aren't always the most respectable books, but they are the books which have stayed with me and helped me build from the ground up, my imagination.