With our wonderful vacation being over and the weather more humid and hotter than ever, my mind keeps replaying all the time we spent in Duluth and the time I spent there as a child.

I thought of this book tonight while I mucked around in our own black pond: the pool. The poor pool went neglected this past winter and we have been playing catch up with it all summer long. As of today, no one has been in it until I climbed in to clean the sides and scoop up all the dead bodies leaves from the bottom. There could have been dead bodies in there for all I know. Lord knows there were enough dead beetles in the pool to warrant a statement of dead bodies. Beetles the size of tennis balls - I kid you not. Ew.

Thankfully Tobey has set the chlorine level to the 'peel your skin off' level and with my bleach sensitivity I am about ready to crawl out of my skin at any second. I am slathering myself with Aveeno lotion as I type this and tomorrow we will make the least liked child of the day crawl in the pool and clean the sides again.

Tobey says I didn't need to jump in the pool, that it could have been cleaned from the outside. But I wanted to use the pool-sucky thing and the best way to do that is to actually be in the pool. Who knew that 10 seconds into doing the sucky thing that the sucker would break. I pushed it around with my foot a bit but it was apparent that was not going to work at all. So tomorrow we need to go and buy yet another sucky thing, our third or fourth since we put the pool in. Pools and boats I tell ya, money pits my friends, money pits.

Anyway, back to the witch. When we moved to Duluth in the middle of my 5th grade year, the class was reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond. I had already missed most of the book and I can't recall a thing about the book other than the title and that it was a Newberry Award Winner. It seems our teacher, Mrs. Citro, loved her some Newberry books.

We went on to read one of my all time favorite children's book: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. I loved that book so much I went on to read the entire series and have even read it to my children, back when they would still let me read to them. I have to thank Mrs. Citro for her gift of books to me. Of course by 5th grade I was reading, mainly Little House on the Prairie books but her selections seemed more grown up to me. More real. No more picture books, no sir.

Well it seems that lab puppies love Aveeno lotion - must be the oatmeal and since Daisy has licked most of the lotion off of me, I need to reapply. What are you still doing here, go read a book or better yet, read your kids a book. A Newberry one.

~ame