It was a hot July day in Philadelphia and I can feel it still, 56 years later. The five boys I was with had grown tired of playing marbles and were seeking for something different.

“Hey!” said freckle-faced (脸上有雀斑的) little Ned. “I got an idea. We haven’t climbed the cliff (悬崖) for a long while.”

“Let’s go!” said someone else excitedly. I hesitated. I longed to be brave and active like them, but I’d been a sickly child most of my eight years and my mother warned me not to take chances.

“Come on!” called Jerry, my best friend. “Just being sick is no reason to a coward (胆小鬼).”

“I’m coming!” I yelled, running after them.

We finally came to the cliff, a near vertical (垂直的) wall of rocks sticking out dangerously, and earth slides, scraggly (乱蓬蓬的) bushes and young trees. It was only about 60 feet high, but to me it looked like the very symbol of the Forbidden and Impossible.

One by one, the other boys climbed upward, finding handholds and toeholds on rock. Trembling and sweating, I began to climb. A hand here, a foot there, my heart pounding in my skinny chest, I made my way up and up.

At some point, I looked back and was horrified. The ground at the base of the cliff seemed very far below; one slip and I would fall, bouncing off the cliff face and ending on the rocks.

In a few minutes the boys started up to the top, from where they would walk home by a roundabout (迂回) route. Before they left, they glanced down at me.

“Hey, wait!” I begged.

“You can stay if you want to,” teased Ned, and the other laughed.

Jerry looked concerned, but he went with the others.

Time passed and I looked down.

As darkness began to fall, I heard the voices of Jerry and my father.

3 . My kids sit in Gee’s living room and carefully lift antique Christmas ornaments (装饰品) out of a delicate cardboard box. They gasp when’ they discover a tiny stuffed cat. Gee stands beside them, quietly explaining each treasure. “Ella, the story is that Tom and I built our ornament collection piece by piece during each year’s after-Christmas sale.” she tells me. She smiles as we leave with the box. Her precious treasures, gathered over a lifetime, have found a new home.

We first met Tom and Gee in the early days of our marriage. Someone had been returning our garbage cans to the garage each garbage day, and Jim and I had wondered who. Then one day we spotted him: an elderly man who lived across the street.

I baked cookies and left them on a stool outside the garage with a thank-you note. When we got home from work that day, a typed letter had replaced the gift. The letter was from Tom and explained how he had come to walk the neighborhood on garbage day, returning cans for people he barely knew. A few years after we d moved in, Tom died. We photocopied that letter and attached it to one of our own for Gee. We told her how special Tom had been to us. She wrote back and told us she still talked to Tom every day. When Gee invited us over to look through Christmas ornaments, I realized how hard it must be to part with that box, a piece of Tom.

These days, we’re piling up boxes of our own. We’re planning a move. The house that seemed so huge six years ago is filled to capacity with furniture and, books and toys and of course people. We know it’s time to go, and yet we can’t seem to stick the For Sale sign up on the lawn. Gaining a third bedroom and maybe an office sometimes seems like an awful trade for all we stand to lose.

The moving boxes are still neatly packed in our basement, but Jim and I agree to wait until January. This Christmas, we’ll decorate our tree with Gee’s ornaments, out of the box that is labeled in, Tom’s handwriting. Maybe I’ll talk to him just as Gee still does.

4 . A little girl lived in a simple and poor house on a hill. Usually she_______play in the small garden. She could see over the garden fence and across the valley a wonderful house with shining golden windows high on another hill._______she loved her parents and her family, she desired to live in such a house and_______all day about how wonderful and exciting it must feel to live there.

At the age when she gained some_______skills and sensibility, she_______her mother for a bike ride outside the garden. Her mother finally allowed her to go,_______her keeping close to the house and not riding too far. The day was beautiful. The little girl knew_______where she was heading. _______the hill and across the valley, she rode to the gate of the golden house.

_______she got off her bike and put it________the gate post, she focused on the path________to the house and then on the house itself. She was very disappointed when she found that all the windows were________and rather dirty.

So sad and heart-broken, she didn’t go any further. She________, and all of a sudden she saw an amazing________. There on the other side of the valley was a little house and its windows were golden. Looking at her little home, she was________that she had been living in her golden house filled with love and care. Everything she dreamed was right there in front of her nose.

5 . Two weeks ago, a 5-year-old girl named Sunshine Oelfke emptied out her piggy bank (存钱罐) onto the living room floor and immediately started counting. Her grandmother, Jackie Oelfke, thought she was playing as she carefully lined up the coins, but then she saw the girl put the coins into a plastic bag and place it in her backpack.

“What are you doing with that money?” Jackie asked her granddaughter.

“I’m taking it to school,” Sunshine replied. “I’m going to take it for milk money. My friend Layla doesn’t get milk— her mom doesn’t have milk money and I do.”

Jackie’s heart melted at Sunshine’s words. Choked with strong feelings, Jackie held her sweet granddaughter tightly in her arms.

Last week, Jackie and Sunshine met with her teacher, Rita Hausher, and handed her the $30 the kindergartner had saved. There are 20 kids in Sunshine’s class and about half don’t get milk. It costs $ 0.45 a carton (纸盒). The total adds up to about $180 a month for every child in the class to have milk every day.

After dropping Sunshine off at school, Jackie posted a tearful video on Facebook to explain her granddaughter’s plan. To her surprise, many people offered to donate toward the cause. Within a week, Jackie raised more than $1,000. Now every student in Sunshine’s class can get free milk for the rest of the year.

Jackie said Sunshine doesn’t see her kind act as a big deal. She was just trying to look out for her friends. “She doesn’t understand the effect she’s brought about,” Jackie said. “But now she knows she can do whatever she puts her mind to.”

10 . I was informed that my four-grade daughter was not going to make it to the fifth grade. The teacher said, “She may not be _________ what we’re trying to accomplish. “He was actually saying she didn’t have the _________. I got mad because I knew she was smart, just as my father had known I was smart when I was _________ in school. We had her tested and found that the trouble she was having was dyslexia-difficulty in reading, which was _________ what I had had. By then I was a successful television writer, and had _________ an Emmy Award for “The Rockford Files.”

Writing and writing, I worked so hard in my late 20s and early 30s, _________ to hear people praise me, because I did badly in all my courses. Eventually, I did become successful, and people now say to me, “So you’ve _________ dyslexia.”

No. I don’t overcome it, but just switch to something within my _________. Some easy things are very hard for me. Most people who go through college _________ twice as fast as I do. I avoid__________ a phone if I can, because I sometimes have to try three times to get the number right.

Despite my weaknesses I view dyslexia as a__________, not a misfortune. Many dyslexics are __________ at right-brain, abstract thought, and that’s what my kind of creative writing is. And I can write quickly, and can get up to 15 pages a day. Writing is my__________.

The real fear I have for dyslexic children is not that they __________ in school, but that they will quit on themselves before they get out of school. Parents have to create__________ for them, whether it’s in music, sports or art. You can make your dyslexic child able to say, “Yeah, reading is hard. But I have other things I can do.”