it's never too late to fall in love

That is the biggest lesson I've learned in the past year.

I'm not speaking of falling in love with a person, though I'm sure the sentiment is every bit as true.

Here I am, pretty much firmly entrenched now in my mid-40s, and I have found myself falling in love over and over again. With fantasy. With fairy tales. With young adult literature. It's such a liberating experience.

But now I have to admit to a small amount of sadness that has popped up in the midst of all this newfound delight. As much as I know that it is a waste of time, I can't help but wish I had made these discoveries long ago.

Specifically, I'm speaking of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. I finished reading The Fellowship of the Ring this past weekend. (Because I'm using it as one of my selections for the Chunkster Challenge, I should be writing a review. However, it seems silly to me to write a review as all but a handful of people have read it, and those who haven't have surely seen the movies. So instead of an actual review, I'm just going to throw out a few thoughts on my reading experience.)

O.K., back to this whole regret thing. It's a horrible thing to say, but I'm envious of my daughter. Oh how I wish I'd read these books as a child like she did, so I had carried them with me my whole life. But as I said, that's a waste of time...it's much better to focus on the gift of discovering them now. And they really are a gift that I'm giving myself. I started reading The Fellowship of the Ring back in January, so I'm sure it seems odd that I've just now finished it.

But, as I know I've said before, the bulk of my reading time comes in snippets of 5 minutes here, 2 minutes there, with an occasional 10 or 15 minute spree thrown in now and then. It's not the ideal way to read--I know that--but you take what you can get, right? I tend to get up pretty early in the morning. It's the only time I get any quantity of uninterrupted time to work on school planning. And I used to spend this couple of hours doing just that seven days of the week. Then I began reading The Fellowship of the Ring. And it took little time to realize what a special experience these books were going to be. Here's where the gift to myself part comes in...I decided that I deserved to "steal" some of that uninterrupted time for myself. So somewhere back in January, I decided to devote those early morning hours on the weekends to reading for "me" as opposed to reading and planning for school. So for the past two months, I have spent the early hours of Saturday and Sunday with Frodo and Sam and Merry and Pippin and Gandalf and Legolas and Gimli and Boromir and Aragorn. And I plan to spend those hours in the months to come in the same manner as I read the rest of the trilogy.

But why did it take me so long to discover their magic? I honestly can't say. It's obviously not like I'd never heard of them before, or even that I didn't know how well-loved they were. But for whatever reason, I always found myself intimidated by them. So it takes a 9/10-year-old girl to break that long-held misconception. Live and learn, huh? Now, instead of dreading the idea of reading these books, I cherish my time spent with them. In fact, cherish isn't even a strong enough word. This is one of those rare adventures that you yearn with everything you've got that you could just somehow enter the pages yourself and be a real, living part of it.

So there you have it...this old dog has learned a new trick.