The winter I moved home to Wisconsin, after living in the West, the East, and abroad, was the worst Wisconsin had seen since I left for college 12 years before—or at least that’s what everyone said. I’d recently moved from Pittsburgh back to Milwaukee with an M.F.A. in creative writing, a truck full of books, and an idea that had been in my mind for years: I wanted to live near family again.

So I returned to my childhood home. I recognized the birch trees heavy with moisture from Lake Michigan, my old red-brick schools, which looked, well, smaller than I remembered them. I wondered how they ever could have contained all those people, hours, events, and dramas. I saw the wide streets, the sprawling fields, and my purple bedroom, which looked way too organized.

More than this, I began to see stories filtering through the snowflakes and light. Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile grins at me from the bathtub. Eloise is on the phone in the next room, blabbing incessantly. Amelia Bedelia breezes through the halls, followed by the aroma of pie. Nate the Great and trusty Sludge investigate a mystery in the study. Little Critter yanks snarls out of his hair in the bedroom.

In the living room, I hear the weatherman whisper his prediction. Did he say it was going to be cloudy with a chance of meatballs? The impending storms whisk me to the kitchen, where I can taste the hearty root vegetables and salt of stone soup well before it’s simmering on the stove. The fluffy scoops of mooncake... Orange juice slides down the windows and a pancake lands (splat!) on the neighbor’s roof.

Picture books invite sensual memories, while YA novels incite emotions. I remember the feeling of meeting my first best friend and how Anne of Green Gables was with me, eyes sparkling with encouragement. Charlotte Doyle was along on many doubt-filled journeys, pushing me forward. The girls in Afternoon of the Elves assured me that, yes, I did see that glimmer of magic in the garden; I can believe what I see. I wonder, would my experiences and my memories be what they are without these books?

I consider taking down these books from my childhood bookcase, but I realize they have been with me all along. I’ve been reading them all along. I’m finding the young me around every corner—the me who informs the ways I’ve changed and grown and the ways I’ve stayed the same. I feel the past pull me closer, then push me away.

My memories feel different now that I’m home—I’m sitting in a different seat in the theater, maybe at a more comfortable distance. At first I feel outcast by this ghost-me, this who-I-was, who stands in judgment of my time away from this place, and then I’m intrigued. This is why I love children’s literature: it’s comforted and challenged me my whole life; it’s always waiting for me, always welcoming, to remind me of who I was and who I have become.

These books always ask, “Who are you now? Are you where you’re from or what you’ve seen?” And, no matter what clutter or noise appears during big life changes, I listen and answer to my childhood books. I always have. They remind me of the joy of peanut butter sandwiches and mac and cheese, and time spent outdoors—of the bright rewards of seeking adventure; of reveling in my quiet, inner thoughts; of hope in its purest form; of peering with wonder into the future.

Reading has been a privilege and a quest, an escape and a homecoming. And now, like Karana in Island of the Blue Dolphins, Strega Nona, Corduroy, Anastasia Krupnik, and Ramona Quimby, I have made it through upheavals and come out the other side, and I know I will again. The stories I have read draw me forward, filling in my own story. Blueberries for Sal has started me dreaming of a move to the Maine.

There’s always another book, pointing the way. A story up ahead. It’s there, I can see it.

Erin Lewenauer hails from Milwaukee, Wis., and is a graduate of Vassar College and the University of Pittsburgh.