Words by Grace E Hall

On the edge of a tiny town in the woods somewhere north of Sandburg, you might have seen a very small wooden house with the words “The Jam-Jar” written on the front door. The house itself was very short and plain, with a huge, sloping roof and not enough wall, as though it were wearing a hat several sizes too big for it, and the shutters were all differing shades of green.  The chimney was long and crooked, and the door perched unsteadily on two gigantic leather hinges.  It was a hot and humid day in the forest, and the birds were drowsing on the tree branches, too sleepy to sing. Even the bugs were humming lazily to one another, without bothering to be loud. Everything, it seemed, was half asleep in the rather sticky, hot rays of the sun. All at once, without warning, there was a great bang from inside the house, as though a bomb had gone off, and several of the green shutters blew open. The birds, shocked by this untimely interruption of their morning doze, came busting...

As I sat across from my brother at the kitchen table, watching him play a video game on his computer, I thought of Aunt Shelby, who loved to say, “It’s the computers that’ll run the world someday, if I could take a guess.”  I hoped she was wrong. You might be wondering who I am.  Well, my name is Bella Wrinkle.  I’m thirteen years old, and my brother George is fifteen.  We live with our parents in an apartment just off the main road, surrounded by restaurants, cheap supermarkets, and traffic.  My mom is all for saving money, homeschooling us someday, and maybe moving to a less central place, but these goals were more of a dream than anything else.  We couldn’t seem to make much headway doing any of them.  Not that we didn’t try, of course.  There was just too much to spend money on, and not enough money to spend on everything, and in the end we were just as centrally located and not home-schooled as ever before.  Pa is a cashier at Walmart, a...

You might notice that this post has a label "other", instead of "writing".  This is where I talk about things other than writing; as the name would suggest.  Another fact about me is I like crocheting.  The wish to crochet comes in bursts; sometimes me and my siblings will crochet for weeks and then stop for months, as the inspiration comes and goes.  This time we are crocheting people, like so: You might notice the beady eyes.  We have gone through quite the journey in making our creation's eyes look good.  It started with yarn bits, tied around the yarn of the face.  This is an example: We did a few of them with tiny bead eyes (which was all we had at the time).  I did it with three beads per eye.  This is the only one of this type I did because they are very time consuming. The yarn eyes are easy and quick but can fray easily and are less sturdy than the other options. The problem with multiple bead eyes...