That gave me such a great sense of accomplishment that I wanted to do more. I wanted to play with it, so I wrote a little story about something our family had done. Then my father brought home an old typewriter. An aunt gave me a page-a-day diary, and I started writing in that, a sentence or two a day about what I was doing. I got interested in writing on my own outside of school when I was ten or eleven. Getting my first library card also opened up even wider worlds to me through reading. Some of my favorites were 'Ferdinand' (I loved the pictures), 'Caddie Woodlawn,' 'Treasure Island,' 'Little Women,' and Nancy Drew books. They always gave me books in addition to my other presents for Christmas and birthdays. My parents liked to read, so our house was always full of books, newspapers, and magazines. Reading has always been one of my favorite things to do. Math was hard for me, but I kept trying and did all right with it. In school, I was good at reading, writing, spelling, and social studies. The ice was just a few inches thick on the ground, so there was no danger of falling through. In winter we went sledding on a not-very-steep hill and skating on ice which the fire department made by flooding an area near the school when the temperature was below freezing. About the only time we needed to be driven anywhere was Saturday or Sunday afternoon, to go to a movie in a nearby town. We spent a lot of time playing at each other's houses. My friends and I walked or rode our bikes all over town. A few steps from our neatly mowed yard were wild strawberries, milkweed, Queen Anne's lace (wild carrot), and vast numbers of other 'weeds' whose names I never knew, all changing with the seasons. This was like living in the city and the country at the same time.

We had fields on both sides, and I walked to school on a well-traveled path that was a shortcut through them. Although our neighborhood was divided into city blocks with paved streets and sidewalks, there were only two houses on our street. I grew up in a very small town, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.

The plant that ate dirty socks series