I have the immense fortune to love where I live. My home has beautiful natural light and tall ceilings (which give me room for more books!). I have filled it with places to curl up, seated or supine, reading the hours away. Our neighborhood is walkable, with easy access to transit, a French bakery, several cafés, lovely parks, and a view of the water. I would be perfectly happy to stay here forever; I am incurably a homebody.

Which means the fact that I have traveled 4 of the last 6 weeks, and am about to travel yet again, a bit galling.

I understand, intellectually, that travel is good for the spirit. I know that it teaches you, expands you, grows you by opening you up to new experiences. I quite like the feeling of adventure as I explore a new place. And yet, in moments like these, my home-loving heart can’t wait to settle in for a spell.

Fortunately, Mr. Owlet has been tending to that heart for over a decade. In that time, he’s devised a series of approaches to get it back to steady-state – recipes, if you will, to soothe my reader’s soul. Here are a few of his best:

A park day prescription

Can there be anything better than laying on a sun-dappled blanket in a park, a stack of books to one side and a pile of your favorite snacks to the other, with a seemingly endless afternoon stretching ahead like a cat preparing for a nap?

(Besides having someone to share it with!)

This is a tried-and-true recipe, an old standard by now in the Owlet household. If I’ve been a bit grumpy and the day looks bright, Mr. Owlet bundles up our picnic blanket and a bag of books and marches me out the door for a few hours to read in the sun. One of our favorite iterations requires a lite rail to an excellent nearby brunch spot, where we can pick up breakfast sandwiches and beverages. A short walk later, we’re at a bayside park, where we can munch, “read” (nap), read, and people-watch to our heart’s content. We end the affair with a 30-minute walk home by the water, usually discussing all we’ve seen and read about in the intervening hours. It’s a perfect way to spend a weekend afternoon.

Reading with the tides

For me, the only way to top a park picnic is to make it an ocean-side park picnic. If reading on the grass is cause for joy, reading on the sand, by the surf, in the sun, is pure bliss. The sounds of the sea and the gentle (or wild) breeze make every page I read feel more alive somehow, as though the motion of the water transfers to the characters on the page.

This can be a standard picnic, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ve spent happy afternoons curled up in the car right next to the beach, happy for its windows and walls to serve as a windbreak… or, if we’re feeling fancy, we’ve rented chairs to settle into for a whole day of seaside reading. The important thing is the combination of sea, sun, and the promise of endless pages.

Browsing after dark

Sadly for me, the sun must go down sometimes. But that’s ok, because then it’s time to break out another recipe: a night spent browsing the shelves at our favorite local bookstores. There’s a distinctive cozy joy to watching the world grow dark as you peruse soaring shelves, a luxury in seeing time happen outside even as, inside your bookstore, it feels endless. For those few moments, it’s as though you’re operating on a different clock than the rest of the universe.

The trick here is in the planned surprise. Often, Mr. Owlet deploys this on a date night that seemed like it would simply comprise dinner. Instead, once we’re done nourishing our bodies, he steers us to a local bookseller, where we browse to our hearts’ content. Thus a moment of ending is transformed to one of a thousand new beginning, one for each new book perused.

Childhood, reconstructed

Of course, once you’re back home, you need a place to read those new pages. And while most nights the couch is enough, Mr. Owlet recently pulled out all the stops to build the best (and only) blanket fort I’ve ever read in.

Centered on (and lit by) our floor lamp, our sheets transformed into a comforting canopy. As we lay on a pile of squishy blankets, reading together in the lamplight, it felt like we’d floated away from the rest of the world. The blanket fort was a liminal space, allowing us to abandon Adulthood and simply exist in the wonder of exploring new narratives together. A perfect setting for a fantasy or a historical mystery or any other read that transcends the boundaries of space, time, or physics.

A shared escape

There is a specific magic that every reader knows. Reading can make everything else slow down, until the only moments are those happening between the pages. The right setting makes that happen just a bit more easily – and for me, it seems, the right setting involves a blanket, yummy snacks, overhead lighting, and the joy of unencumbrance.

That joy is multiplied when it’s enabled by and shared with a loved one. It’s one thing to escape the mundane alone; to do it in the company of someone who’s actively created space for it is more nourishing than any fancy bookish adventure. Mr. Owlet, by making space for reading moments no matter where or when we are, consistently shows he cares.

So as the summer starts and the sun comes out in full blast, grab a blanket and a loved one and make some room for that liminal reading moment. I’m sure I’ll see you two picnics away, snacks galore, blissfully enveloped in adventure near and far.

Until next time – stay cozy, and stay curious!