Chapter Five: The library, our quiet escape into curiosity

There wasn't much to entertain a child in that first Queensland home. No television worth mentioning, no toys beyond whatever we'd made ourselves, and certainly no money set aside for anything that wasn't food, rent, or the slow, steady project of filling an empty home. What we had instead was a library card each, and a set of children's encyclopedias our mother had bought for us in hopes of giving her children the education she never received.

We didn't think of it much at the time. We thought of it as simply what we had. It's only looking back now that we understand how deliberate it was, how our mother, a woman who'd grown up with almost nothing to read in a refugee camp, made sure that whatever else we went without, we would not go without books and education.

The local library became something close to a second home for all of us. It was free, it was warm in winter and cool in summer, and the lovely staff never minded how long we'd stay the day, reading their collections of books for children. We'd drive there most weeks, sometimes more, and come back with as many books as the limit allowed, working our way through everything from fairy tales to atlases to whatever caught our eye on the shelf at exactly the right height for a child to reach.

At home, the encyclopedias did the rest. We'd open them not because we were assigned to, but because there was genuinely nothing better to do on a quiet Sunday afternoon, and somewhere in that boredom, something unexpected happened. We started to actually love it. Flicking from one entry to the next, following one curiosity into another, learning about countries we'd never visit and animals we'd never see, simply because the pages were there and the warm Sunday afternoons was long.

Our parents didn't have the means to give us much in those years. But somehow, without ever framing it this way, they gave us something that has shaped every one of us since, the understanding that curiosity costs nothing, that wonder doesn't require money, and that a quiet afternoon with a good book can be its own kind of wealth.

We think about this chapter often, now that we're grown, because it's the clearest thread between who our parents were and who we've become. The same instinct that sent our mother searching for books is the instinct that, decades later, would help shape a brand built around noticing small things, slowing down, and finding richness in the everyday.

We didn't grow up with much. But we grew up curious, and that turned out to matter more.