Advice from a small town girl

I’ve been reading again.

I can imagine some of you thinking, “Oh, no!”

But that won’t stop me.

A little background on my reading may be in order.

My mother was an elementary school teacher who believed that the ability to read was the key to everything. Success, happiness, everything. And her children learned to read.

The books I favored as a child featured animals and heroic children. Sometimes children and heroic animals. I would lose myself in the stories, and frequently got in trouble when I was so far gone I didn’t hear my mother call me.

As I grew older, the animals were replaced, first...