storyfires

In honor of intellectual freedom and ALA Banned Books Week (Sept. 26-Oct 3), I'm making a plug for reading a banned book this week. You'd be astounded at some of the books on the ALA's banned list: Where the Wild Things Are , Speak , Harry Potter , Golden Compass , To Kill a Mockingbird , Bridge to Terabithia , Farenheit 451 , Lord of the Flies , A Separate Peace , and the Gutenberg Bible, to name a few. Some of my favorite books have landed their authors in jail, including the wonderful Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka. Call of the Wild was burned in Nazi bonfires. I'm admittedly conservative about the books I'd personally hand to a young child; I believe, like Corrie Ten Boom's father (the Hiding Place), that some subjects are too heavy to ask young children to carry, just as a large suitcase might be. But that's a decision for individual caretakers to make for their own children, not for other people's. And I get angry when others try to make that

I collect happy thoughts in a file folder. Really. I stick things in there like the Mothers' Day card my daughter once made with a picture of an oversized version of me in my glasses and ugliest green sweats with a creepy grin on my face, and I'm standing on a mini version of earth like some sort of balancing super-sweat woman; the caption underneath my huge self says, "to Mom, the best person in the WORLD." Wow. And you guys thought YOU were hot stuff. Think again--I'm better. The best. Arguably, according to this picture, the largest, as well. Though she's the daughter who liked to balance my ego by shouting when she was mad at me that I was the WORST person in the whole world. But I digress from happy. Anything that makes me smile goes into that file in the drawer. And I like to take out my happy thoughts and read them sometimes. So here are just a few of mine this week, and not from the drawer: *the Wasatch Mountains in the fall *yellow ch