I’m a huge reader. When I was six years old, I learned to read in Grade 1 with Mrs. Ross.

But before I learned to read, I was frustrated by my slow progress. I remember whining loudly to my parents, while sliding dramatically down the wall in the dining room: “I’ll NEVER learn to read!” I was pretty impatient for a six-year-old. I must have known intrinsically that reading and writing would become integral parts of who I am.

Fast forward a few years and I began to read Trixie Belden books. It was a reprint series, more than 30 books in total written by two different authors in the 1950s and 1960s. I loved them. I would get a new one, whether purchased or borrowed from the library, and I would read it. Literally, I would get it, then sit down and read the whole thing through. When I was ten, I could plow through a book in about 6 hours.

Eventually I collected almost the whole series. They’re boring beige paperbacks, but they hold a special place in my heart. Unfortunately they didn’t manage to carve any room in my memory… I only remember one plot line from the entire series.

Thirty years later, this is the one that stuck with me: the story of the fish that lived in complete darkness and therefore evolved to blindness. I didn’t remember the title, but when I scanned my shelf The Mystery at Bob-White Cave seemed promising. I was rewarded five pages in when Trixie read aloud from a magazine article about the fish: “because it was pitch-dark in the caves, gradually, through thousands of years, their eyes became mere mounds of flesh, then disappeared altogether.”

So today, I’m reading a book from childhood that managed to stay with me for three decades.

And as a special treat from my ten-year-old self to my almost-40-year-old-self, on page 20 I found a splatter of what looks to be dried chocolate.

Some things haven’t changed in thirty years. I still love finishing a book almost as much as I love reading it, and I still love chocolate.

Something that looks suspiciously like dried chocolate on page 20.

If you look carefully, you can see three copies of The Mystery at Bob-White Cave, since I started collecting the original hardcovers from auctions and used-book stores.