Introduction

     Horace Mann is well known in the education world- but I did not know this until recently.  I have, however, loved a quote of his about books for a long time: "A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has the right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them."  

    I worked for 4 years running a Children's Department in a quintessential New England town.  It was a thoroughly rewarding job: filled with storytimes and homework and puppets and crafts and Summer Reading and so many wonderful interactions.  The best part of my job, the part I miss every single day since leaving, was reader's advisory. I poured over the journals picking books like Christmas presents, feeling this intense joy in ordering a new story with someone in mind who would love to read it.  I miss roaming the shelves, fingers dragging slowly along spines, imagining myself an apothecary picking the medicine to save someone from their woes.  I miss the child coming in a day- three days-two weeks later to ask for more.  

    My husband and I left Boston and our courting behind, we left New Hampshire and our first years as husband and wife to memories, packed up and traveled for six months.  We lived in France for most of it. These moments will to be told another time.

   I am here in Iowa again, where I was born and raised.  We are here to settle into a house with a yard (we hope). To eventually have cats and kids and joyful days. We want Iowa to be the memories of us as parents.  I want to be in the classroom with students who look out at the horizon and think about where they are. How the stories they read all began with someone who experienced something human that they decided to share.  

    I think everyone is a writer.  People write their day with the choices they make. With the stories they tell at dinner, with what they say in a status update on Facebook.  I define myself as a wishful writer.  I write in my head all day long, rarely preserving the tales.  I have taken courses and gone to conferences and submitted children's books for publication (and got rejected).  I have delved in deep for assignments- but I haven't yet figured out how to write for myself.  

   Horace Mann has another quote that is fitting for this entry:  "Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago."

   After ten years, I am back.