#52Ancestors - Week 12 - Joined Together

This week's theme of "Joined Together' can be interpreted in so many ways.  As family we are joined together by blood, by marriage, by love, by many ties and shared interests and shared memories.  People are joined together by work, hobbies, sport, region, country, language - the list goes on.

Every family has different activities and interests that bring them together.  During my childhood my family joined together most evenings for a meal and relaxation time afterwards.  Although I didn't quite understand it at the time, we came together in a way few families did any more - in a time when most spent the evening at home gathered around the television, we frequently left the TV off and gathered for the evening to talk, do craft and read aloud to one another.

While neither of my parents had the opportunity to continue their education as they wished, both valued learning highly and were determined their children would have opportunities they did not.  Both loved reading and passed that love on to my sister and I.  Reading aloud to one another was simply something we did - reading in bed on lazy Sunday mornings, and reading around the kitchen table after dinner in the evening.  We all did handcrafts - so while we knitted, sewed, carved and crafted, we each took turns reading aloud.  The books we children read became progressively more complex as we grew up and developed our reading skills, but even from an early age we read, or made up a story from the pictures in our picture books.

My sister and I both started primary school already confidently reading chapter books.  What our teachers made of us I don't quite know, but I do remember my Grade 1 teacher sending me to the school library to pick out some more challenging books after it became obvious our classroom readers were too basic and I was bored with them.

A shared love of reading continued throughout our lives and joined us together - recommending authors and titles to one another, discussing what we read, and sharing time together reading quietly.  While we all have different tastes and favorite books and authors, we overlap in many areas and our love of reading joins us together.