I love to dive into a book and ignore every, other living soul. I do it often. I’m blessed by literacy and the luxury of time. When Danny and I talk about getting older he always laments losing his hearing and I dread losing my eyesight. Audio books are fine but I like to hold a book, to smell it, to flip back to previous passages, to close it entirely and stare into space while analyzing clues in a desperate attempt to solve the crime before the protagonist does.

Saturday Danny drove us to Monroeville, Ala., hometown to both Harper Lee and Truman Capote (I should have bottled some of that water). He considerately took the girls off for lunch at the Courthouse Café and I blissfully and gloriously toured the courthouse museum. All. By. Myself. Let the sheer beautifulness of that statement sink in, friends. I didn’t have to take even one person to the bathroom. I never rolled my eyes at a husband who STILL hasn’t read To Kill a Mockingbird. No one pulled on my sleeve or said, “this is boring.” I took my own, sweet time and read every word, studied every exhibit. After the new courthouse was built, this one became a small, county museum with dark, creaky wood floors and uneven stairs leading up to the courtroom. It didn’t take all day but for 90 minutes, I was in literature heaven.

Few visitors joined me so when I stepped into the courtroom, I was all alone. I sat in various chairs around the room, soaking it in, reminding myself that the trial never really happened. Nelle (her friends all called her Nelle and after Saturday, I do, too) based everything on her hometown, more than I’d ever realized but the trial itself is entirely fiction. Her father was a civil not criminal attorney. When I sat in that courtroom, though and imagined young Nelle up in the balcony watching her daddy, she was Scout and her daddy was Atticus and the trial was tangibly real and I don’t care what you say about my sanity cause I know what I’m talking about here. Besides, that specific trial might have been made up but the circumstances were sadly, highly relatable. Nelle knew what she was talking about and chose to tell her novel through the eyes of a child so that out of the mouth of a babe, the cruelness and idiocy of hatred was impossible to ignore. If a sassy tomboy can see the truth, why can’t grown men and women?

I’m purposely skirting spoilers in case you haven’t read the story. I don’t want to talk about Go Set a Watchman and the two museum volunteers didn’t bring it up even once though they did have copies of it for sale. It’s just, it’s just not worthy of Nelle and to be honest, I wish I’d never read it.