Chapter One When "Read to Me" Becomes "Read with Me" When I was a little girl, one of four children, I loved it when I was sick and able to stay home from school. That meant I had my mother all to myself. She made me chicken soup, I drank CocaCola, and we read. As I snuggled under the covers, she lay beside me and read from an old book, one with which my grandmother had begun her teaching in the mountains of Ashe County, North Carolina. She opened my mind to wonderful things – Ichabod Crane and Sleepy Hollow; Rip Van Winkle; The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat; Barefoot Boy with cheeks of tan; Wynken, Blynken and Nod; Hiawatha and the shores of Gitchee Goomee. "What is so rare as a day in June?" I heard first at age seven.