I fell in love with books at a young age.  The first volumes I owned were secondhand paperbacks, handed down to me by relatives and neighbors.  I remember the outline of thin treasures lined up on my bookshelf, dogeared and thumbed-through hundreds of times, lovingly memorized by a child willing to take another journey through her imagination at any moment.  I wept when bedtime came because that meant lights out, although I learned some stealthy ways of keeping my reading are

As a child I spent parts of my summer vacation with my mother’s relatives, mostly her sister.  My Aunt Jo had two daughters my age, and since my own sister was five years my senior and wanted nothing to do with me, having two playmates who actually wanted my company was a welcome change.  I went from my rustic home on the farm to the relatively urban life of Beverly, where my cousins had a swimming pool in their tiny backyard, and walked down busy streets to find ice cream st

When I was a kid, all activity in my house stopped when the Olympics came along.  In those days, we had to wait four long years for a double-header of Summer and Winter events scheduled tightly within several months.  We gathered in front of our flickering black and white television, eagerly watching the best athletes from all over the world as they competed for those shiny medals.  Sports were a pretty big thing in my house anyway, but the Olympics were really something spec