Moon Over Seattle

My birthday was the other day (May 5) and D and I walked up the hill to the big park at the top.  We sat on the benches and waited for the moon to rise.  It was a beautiful evening, a little chilly, a little cloudy, but relatively still.  We could hear birds and people talking on the side streets.  We could hear 4 men and their dog, soon to be our companions on the wait, walking around the periphery of the field below us.

We waited some time for that first glimpse.  The streetlights and the house lights came on, and then the moon finally made its appearance.  It was so amazingly beautiful, orange and brilliantly lit.  Our camera doesn't take the best photos without a tripod but this is the best I could do while holding my breath.

do you see it in the trees?

We later sat out on the porch with the fountain splashing and the fire leaping and waited for the moon to come above the trees so we could watch it from the comfort of our own yard.  We tipped some of the good stuff to the earth to honor the gods and my mom, threw glitter into the air (thanks for passing along that bling gene, Mom.), and then headed in to the warmth of our little home.

(Oh, the book part of the post:  There was a fine stack of books on the bedside table:  Insurgent, Cold Cereal,  Caddy's World, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and a DVD pack of the old Dark Shadows.  It was a Saturday and I could sleep in on Sunday; I wanted so much to read all night long and was asleep before Red Green was over.)

What ONE Book Should Be On Every Child's Shelf?

Trees in the 'hood before the wind and rain.

Sunrise was at 5:47, sunset will be at 8:27.

There will be a Super Moon on Saturday and a meteor shower!  How lucky are we?  Although, after spending a lot of days reading a series of books about a virus contained in a comet's tail sweeping over the earth and killing the adults, leaving 251 teens to head into space to colonize a new planet, maybe my excitement is only a bit misplaced.  Oh, well.  I still hope it will be clear enough to see the moon, if not a couple of meteors! 

What one single book do you think every child should read?

I thought this was a very hard question to answer. Back and forth in front of the shelves in my house, back and forth in my head:  A dictionary?  A Wrinkle in Time?  Where the Wild Things Are? Something all encompassing or specific? How do you choose ONE book when every child is so different?  Do they need a book that will show them how to survive?  How to make good decisions?  How to find the beauty in everyone?  How do you make that decision?

Inspired by the recent World Book Night event, 6 different children's book bloggers share their thinking about the books they'd choose in this month's edition of Ask a Book Blogger from Random Acts of Reading.  I'd say that these books should probably be on everyone's shelves, don't you?