The Right Word
When I was a little girl, our brown encyclopedias lived on the bottom shelf of the living room bookcase like quiet, patient companions waiting to be chosen. Their gold-lettered spines caught the afternoon light, each volume guarding a different country, century, constellation, or creature I had yet to discover. Back then, nearly every family I knew owned a set, purchased from traveling salesman who arrived at the front door carrying the hopeful promise that the world itself could be brought home one volume at a time. Ours rested exactly where my small hands could reach them, asking nothing more of me than curiosity. I didn’t know it then, but somewhere between those pages, a little girl who loved to read was quietly becoming a writer.
I would settle cross-legged on the carpet, pull one carefully into my lap with both hands, and pause for just a moment before lifting the whisper-thin page. Not because I had homework. Not because anyone asked me to. I’d simply open to a random page and wander. Within minutes, the room around me would fade away.
If my mother called my name from the kitchen, I rarely heard her.
“Renee!”
Silence.
“Renee!”
A moment later she would appear in the doorway, drying her hands on a dish towel. “There you are,” she’d say with a smile. “I’ve been calling you.”
I’d blink as though I’d just returned from somewhere very far away. Outside, the sweet fragrance of gardenias drifted through the screen door while the waxy citrus scent of Lemon Pledge lingered on the furniture she had polished that morning. For a moment, the words in the book still seemed more real than the room around me. I wasn’t entirely sure which world I belonged to. Slowly, the room came back into focus.
“You did?” I’d ask.
She’d laugh softly.
“You get so lost in those books.”
“I know,” I’d answer, sliding my finger back to the line I’d been reading. “I’m almost finished.”
She smiled because we both knew I wasn’t.
She would often step closer and glance down at the page.
“What are you reading now?”
I’d look down.
“The Sahara Desert,” I’d read aloud.
She repeated the words slowly, as though tasting them.
“The Sahara Desert,” she’d say again. “Do you want to go there one day?”
I thought for a long moment.
“Yes,” I finally answered. “I do.”
She brushed a strand of my fine blonde hair behind my ear, kissed my forehead, and smiled.
“Keep reading, baby.”
Then she disappeared back into the rhythm of her day.
I disappeared into mine.
I never heard the dishes clink in the sink or the vacuum cleaner hum down the hallway. By then I was somewhere between Egypt and the Milky Way, between Roman emperors and blue whales, convinced every word worth knowing waited patiently on the next page. For a while, I knew astonishing things. I could have told you about King Tut’s tomb, the rings of Saturn, a Tesla coil, and dog breeds no one had ever asked me about. Strangely, I don’t remember most of what those encyclopedias taught me.
I remember the questions my mother asked instead.
She never hurried me through a sentence. She wanted to know what I was reading, where the words had taken me, and what I thought of them. She wasn’t interested in whether I could repeat the facts. Only years later did I understand that her questions were never really about
the book. They were about the little girl reading it.
Facts can fill a page, but the right words reveal something deeper. They uncover who we are, what we hope for, and sometimes who we are becoming long before we know it ourselves. It took me years to understand why. My mother’s questions never tested what I knew. They uncovered what I longed for.
Facts told me the Sahara was the largest hot desert on earth. Words let me feel the heat shimmering above the sand, hear the silence stretching beyond the horizon, and imagine why someone would willingly walk into both. Facts were never the difficult part. Finding the right word was. The right word doesn’t simply describe the truth. It reveals it.
When I first imagined becoming a writer, I didn’t picture my first byline or the first article I would publish. I thought about a little girl sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with an encyclopedia balanced in her lap. I thought about a mother standing in the doorway with a dish towel in her hands. Long before I understood that words could heal, connect, or quietly change the direction of a life, I was learning to disappear inside them.
Every book invited me to become someone else’s witness. Every sentence taught me to pay closer attention. Every page quietly insisted that the world was larger, stranger, and more beautiful than I had imagined. I still believe another world is waiting on the next page and I still believe my mother was never really asking about the Sahara. She was asking what kind of world I believed was possible.
Years later, I stood beneath the endless sky of the Sahara in Tunisia, watching the wind reshape the dunes one grain of sand at a time. In that moment, I understood she had given me far more than a destination. She had given me permission to imagine the life I had been longing for before I knew how to name it. And when I sit down to write, I realize I have neverreally left that spot on the living room floor. I’m still turning one more page, still chasing one
more sentence, still searching for the right word. For years, I thought the right word was the one that described something perfectly. Now I think it is the one that quietly changes what comes next. Perhaps the first right word I ever found was “yes.”
