She stood next to me in the dining room, wearing a red top, black striped pants, and white leather shoes smaller than my hand. "Here," she said, resting a colorful set of nesting plastic cups on my knee...

She can paint a picture of what growing up in a small town was like and make me long to be there too. When I was little, she told me all about her family, friends, and neighbors in her small town. The people there seemed to be suspended in time until she told me another story, and they would come to life again...

On our daily drive to school, I would take a long, winding back road lined with older houses and mature flowering trees and hardwoods. But one chilly morning, it was the scene above that grabbed our attention...