"The Scary House on the Corner" By: Kaylee Smith

As a special Halloween treat I am posting a little creepy tale that was written by my daughter, Kaylee. Kaylee has many talents and writing is just one of them. Happy Halloween!!


"The Scary House on the Corner" By: Kaylee Smith

Every Halloween all the kids in my neighborhood dare each other to go inside the scary dark house on the corner. Well, this year it happened . My best friend and I went inside the haunted house. It was at 8:28 pm to be exact and the weather was very, very cold and rainy with some spooky thunder. Madison and I walked very slowly up the driveway and very quietly we went inside the house.

As we went inside the house there was a long hallway with ten doors. We opened the second door we saw, and when we went through it, we were in some sort of laboratory. There were cupboards all along one wall. In the middle of the room was a fire pit and hanging above the flames was a large black cauldron with green slimy goo boiling over the top. Then we walked over to the wall of cupboards. The first cupboard we opened was filled with all different sized bottles of potions. The potions were in order from A to Z we grabbed Z and ran out the door. Then we were back in the hallway and we opened the next door. Then when we went through it, that led us to the back yard.
When we were in the backyard we opened the bottle and thousands of ghosts flew out of it. We threw the bottle across the yard and started running as fast as we could. We were running so fast we crashed into a tall scary man. He had black hair and his neck was bent. He was wearing a purple turtle neck sweater, a black lab coat and in one hand he had a bottle of green bubbly potion. He looked so angry. We were really scared, so we started running again and he chased after us. But he had really big feet and his boots were untied, so he tripped. When he tripped the potion that was in his hand spilled on us and every part of our clothes that the green potion touched started to smoke. Luckily Madison had a water bottle in her backpack and she was a quick thinker and pulled the water out of her bag and poured it on us. Then we started running again.
We were running so fast that we ran right past the ghosts, but the guy was not fast enough and the ghosts got him. We went back inside the house, but there were so many doors that we could not remember which one led out to the front yard. We opened every door until we found the right one. When we were finally in the front yard we walked back down the driveway the same way we came in and found our friends. We told our friends about everything that happened, but they did not believe us, until they saw the burn marks on our clothes.
The End

Should Fairy Tales be a Lesson for Reality?

Countless variations of fairy tales that convey a moral or social lesson through interesting characters and imaginative settings have existed throughout history all over the world. Often the tale will involve a far-fetched sequence of events or an element of magic that stimulates our imagination and implores us to keep reading. Fairy tales often project fantastic or frightening other worlds in which ugly beasts are transformed into princes, villains are turned into stone, and wishes are granted for those who are good and virtuous. But before we get to “happily ever after”, we must first read a tale of good vs. evil. In every fairy tale lies a timeless, ever-changing world, where anything is possible, good triumphs over evil, hope is alive, and dreams come true. For the most part the purpose of a fairy tale is to entertain the reader and subtly pass on a moral or lesson, but are the morals and/or lessons reasonable? And do the false realities and fearful concepts in these fairy tales do more harm than good to the children who read them?

One dangerous commonality of fairy tales is instant wish fulfillment.
Cinderella scrubs the floors while wearing rags as she looks off into the distance at the beautiful castle and sobs desperately to go to the ball. But it wouldn't be a fairy tale if her fairy godmother didn’t show up to grant her wish and she didn’t live happily ever after with Prince Charming, would it? What moral did Cinderella teach us? That we should treat others the way we want to be treated? Good. That if you do as you are told then a fairy godmother will appear out of nowhere and grant your wish? Not so good. It's a dangerous perception bordering completely on fantasy. These stories teach children that life is all about wishes coming true, much like how the “Ugly Duckling” turns into a beautiful swan when he wished just that. It’s a beautiful lesson of hope and everyone needs to be given hope at some point. In fact “The Ugly Duckling” has always been one of my favorite fairy tales. I think it‘s a perfect story to read to children of any age who may feel a bit awkward or shy. The last line of the tale is the most telling of all. “I never dreamed of such happiness as this, while I was an ugly duckling” (Anderson) It’s sweet and it makes us feel as if anything can happen which is a good feeling for children as well as adults, but it also gives a false reality which can be dangerous.

It seems that fairy tales were written specifically to create these false realities in order to get children to change their behavior. Although many of these writers do have the very best intentions, let us not forget that in some fairy tales giants devour little children and second wives feast on their stepdaughters. In “Hansel and Grethal the witch sits in wait and readies her cauldron to boil the children up. Snow White's stepmother is so determined to own Snow White’s beauty secrets that she sets out to devour her liver and lungs, and so on. So if the theory that fairy tales are to teach our children to be brave, then we shouldn't be surprised if they end up becoming deranged cannibals. We taught them early. There is a good virtue somewhere in both of these stories. “Hansel and Grethal” teaches the child that very bad things can and do happen but that they can be survived and overcome. A very realistic lesson. In Snow White we learn that jealousy and vanity will do you more harm than good, also realistic.
But is the moral worth exposing our children to cannibalistic acts?

In Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” the lesson learned was to not believe everything you are told, but the story is about a man walking around town nude. In “Little Red Riding Hood” by, Charles Perrault, our children learn not to talk to strangers. It’s just too bad that Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother had to be eaten to teach that valuable lesson.

I believe the answer to all of this lies in Chapter 9 of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland”, when Alice meets up with the Duchess:
'You're thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can't tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit.'
'Perhaps it hasn't one,' Alice ventured to remark.
'Tut, tut, child!' said the Duchess. 'Every thing's got a moral, if only you can find it.'
Everything has a moral. Every fairy tale, novel, legend, movie even actual life experience has a moral, if you know how to find it.
My point here is, that there are potential positive and negative lessons in every aspect of life, including the stories we read to our children. As those who guide children, we must recognize that a child cannot always distinguish the difference from fantasy and reality. Although children have the most vivid imaginations and that is something that should be encouraged, they should not be deceived about the truth of things. The positive use of stories can stimulate courage, inspire nobility of heart, modeling the honor in the truth and give hope for better things to come. It’s our responsibility as parents and educators to help children differentiate between what is reasonable and what is absurd. Evil witches, wicked stepmothers, ugly stepsisters, and fairies are all popular characters in fairy tales, but stepmothers aren't always wicked, stepsisters aren't always ugly and fairies aren‘t real. The same truth applies that princes aren't always charming and peasants aren’t always courageous and heroic. Fairy Tales make too extreme of examples for children and they have a “two-edged sword” sort of approach when teaching a moral because it seems to always leave an unrealistic example of “every dream that you wish, will come true” Should we choose to read fairy tales and stumble across a lesson of a moral, we must show the reality of the situation and then explain the importance of the lesson if we choose to adopt it. We must also explain the unrealistic nature of the tale as a whole. The lessons can be reasonable and the stories can be fantastically magical and inspiring with the proper guidance.

One Hundred Years in the Making

Mark Twain was just one of several pen names used by Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He was born November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. Samuel was the sixth of seven children. When Samuel was four years old, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, the town that eventually became Mark Twain's inspiration for the town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Anyone who really knows me, knows how much I love Mark Twain. In his time he was a fantastic writer that was able to use his childhood memories, add a bit of imagination and write some really fantastic and entertaining novels. He also wrote his own autobiography, but made arrangements to insure that it would not be duplicated or released until 100 years after his death. Well, this April will be year 100. I first heard about the autobiography when I was in high school and I remember thinking, How clever of him to make everybody anticipate such a thing. As the years went on, I worried it might just be a rumor. Well it’s not! His original manuscript which has been locked up at the University of Berkley is now being prepared for release next spring. I can not wait to read the perspective Samuel Clemens had of his own life.

I have to be honest though, Twains novels are not my favorite reads but his heart is clearly visible in every one and that is why most people enjoy them so much. In the preface of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain writes “part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves” To me that means he hoped that adult readers would read the story and take a journey back in time and remember what is was like to be a child. By doing so they might appreciate the fact that the children around them are experiencing the same things that they once did. Adults sometimes lose patients with rowdy or overly imaginative children. I think Twain just wanted to help those adults remember that they were once rowdy and overly imaginative children themselves. I believe Mark Twain wrote from a place in his heart that really just wanted others to go on a nostalgic adventure. What a great gift to be able to give.
　
We also have Twain to thank for that phrase we all hear “Mind your p’s and q’s” When Twain lived in Missouri he worked as a newspaper editor. One of his duties was to put the letters that were to make all the words on the page in sentence form backwards. Twain once wrote in a news article about the two letters in the English alphabet that were mirror images of themselves. He said, "no mater how hard he tried he could never mind his p's and q's". He wrote that when he did his job he had to make sure that if he choose a q it was really a p and not a q but when printed it was backward so if it was a p it was really a q and vise versa. The redundancy was ultimately the reason he left editing. Now there are many different stories as to how this saying came about but this article dated January of 1862 was the earliest documentation of it.
In Twain's later years he wrote less, but his gift giving continued. He began giving motivational speeches in public forums. His satiric humor and wise words quickly made him a celebrity and profoundly affected later American writers such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, both of whom have mentioned Twain as an inspiration for their own writing. His humorous nature and poetic writing set him apart from all other writers of his time and also greatly inspires me. The entertainment and whole hearted good feeling I feel when reading his work is something that I hope to pass on to others someday.
　
　Some of my favorite Mark Twain Quotes are:



“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” ~
Mark Twain
~
“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” ~
Mark Twain
~
“A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.”
~
Mark Twain
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“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
~
Mark Twain
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“Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”
~
Mark Twain
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“Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”
~
Mark Twain

Book Lovers Unite!

　
The Kindel is an electronic book and/or portable reading device that is able to download electronic books, magazines and other types of reading material. It uses an electronic paper reading display that replicates the view and text of a real book page. It comes in several different styles and several other companies also make a similar product. Although the Kindel, eBook and iPad devices are high priced, the actual book download is much cheaper than the physical book. So, ultimately if you are a frequent reader, you’ll make your money back eventually. With that said, it is still not for me. In my opinion, electronic book is a contradictory term. I love books. I love the smell of the paper and being able to dog - ear the pages that I want to go back to later. Should I come across a word I don’t know while reading, I will underline it, look up the definition and write it in the margin. I have actually had friends and family thank me for this when they have borrowed a book of mine to read. Until last November, the best part of my week was visiting a little used book store just a few miles from my home. The Store was called Book Box.
A Cow bell on the door, that is painted like a cow, chimes as I enter Book Box, a small used book store and one of my favorite places. The familiar smell of must and old paper is comforting, so I take in a deep breath. I deposit my books for donation in the designated basket marked “Thanks for Recycling“. Penny, the shop owner and only employee I have ever seen here, is in her usual spot behind the counter in her rocking chair working on a knitting or crochet project. Usually when I come to the shop she is reading. I always ask her about her book and every time she amazes me with a detailed description and her love for books is evident. Many times I have picked up a copy of what ever book she is reading because she has intrigued me. I have guessed that Penny must be in her late sixties and her accent tells me she is German. Although she is a short stout woman, she looks delicate. Her face is soft with kind eyes and flawless skin. I have been in this place dozens of times over the years and she looks exactly the same, almost as if she is preserved here. I imagine she doesn’t age because she spends so much of her time lost in books not living her own life, but the life of the characters within those stories. How amazing it would be if that were true.
“Good afternoon dear. Looking for anything special?” She recites.
“Yes thank-you, I am looking for something totally different today. I want a really sappy romance novel.”
With a sly smile she calls me “Cheeky” and points me to the left.
Book Box is more like a comfy old library then a store. It’s a pretty small place and decorated like a grandmothers house. Complete with a hand made sea shell wind chime hanging near the window with a yellow and blue bird print curtain. In the center of the room is a seventies style throw rug with hideous orange flowers trimmed in brown. The green from the leaves and flower stems is the color of pea soup. It is absolutely the ugliest rug I have ever seen, yet it fits perfectly here. Placed atop the rug are four high back chairs all of various colors. Two by Two facing each other and in between the chairs are antique end tables. The end tables are covered in lace cloth with a box of tissue and bowl of peppermints on each. A collection of mismatched book cases align the walls and there are long tables in front of those with stacks of unorganized books. In front of one of the higher shelves is a little wooden stool with “Stand up to be Tall : Sit down to be Small” painted on it. There is just the right amount of every genre of book here. From biographies to Sci-fi and even a small collection of children’s books on a little wooden shelf with a matching rocker. After I have perused the romance section and pulled a couple of books off the shelf, I settle into my favorite chair to examine them more closely. My favorite chair is big and red with very faint brown stripes. The cushion is warn and every time I sit down in it, I feel like I am being hugged. The butt indention, that probably took many years and I don’t want to think about how many butts to make, seems to be molded perfectly to me. As I am being hugged in the red chair reading book jackets, Penny offers me coffee or tea. She is so sweet. I feel at home here, safe and like time doesn’t really exist. This little hole in the wall shop is cheerfully eclectic and although, its visually stimulating, I often get lost in my thoughts when I visit. Here I am surround by millions of thought out words in all different styles of writing. I think about the minds who wrote them and the feeling put in them. I am inspired by the imagination, frustration, love, hate, fear and pride that went into the composition of each book. I often spend hours skimming pages with admiration as Penny silently sits in her rocker.
Last November Penny passed away and the store closed down. I no longer get my weekly fix of sniffing old books and Penny‘s interesting insights, however, I will carry the feeling with me for the rest of my life. I am a true book lover and although we are fast approaching a totally digital society in this one category, I choose not to move forward. I will not be clicking the “Like” button for Kindel.