The Sweetgum ladies are all keeping secrets. Even as they gather each month to discuss the great romances of literature and their accompanying knitting projects, the members of the Sweetgum Knit Lit Society are hiding behind their novels and their needles. The pastor's wife doesn't want her husband to know that she's being blamed for a drop in church donations. The young woman who dreams of leaving her small town behind won't admit her true feelings when a man from her past returns. The newly widowed town matriarch is keeping quiet about her surprising new best friends, and the youngest member, a struggling teenager, doesn't want anyone to know that her erstwhile boyfriend doesn't want to date her openly. The newest member of the group finds herself struggling to keep her family together after her father's death. And then there's the mother of four who's hiding her grief at leaving her infant son in daycare so she can return to the working world. What will happen when each of their truths comes out? Reading some of the great love stories of literature might just open their eyes to the possibility of happiness if they would let their secrets out. Sure, it's scary, and there's a lot on the line. But the truth about love is that as long as it's a secret, it can't transform their lives. *first published as The Sweetgum Ladies Knit for Love (2009)

Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) was born in 980 in Buhara, and died in 1037 in Hamadan, Persia (now Iran). He is a physician, physicist, writer, philosopher and scientist. He was known in the West as the founder of modern science in the medieval ages, the leader of physicians and dubbed as the “Doctors’ Doctor”. His fame rests on his book, Al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb (The Canon of Medicine) which was regarded as the principal medical work in the field of medicine for seven centuries and this book remained as a reference source for medical studies in the universities of Europe until the end of seventeenth century. If now we examine his work “The Canon of Medicine”, we find that he has an extensive explanation of anatomy and in his work in which he gives a clear definition of some organs which can be visualised with today’s some special imaging devices, today, there are still many unresolved and unstudied methods. Ibn Sina’s curative recipes were used in the European medicine for many centuries even after his death. The famous astronomer Copernicus, also a nephrologist, has healed using the recipes of Ibn Sina who has lived before his birth over 500 year ago. When i had first read the second volume of Ibn Sina’s study, “The Canon of Medicine”, telling about which plant is recuperative and the applications of these plants internally and externally, i came up with the idea of bringing this study down to a simpler level of understanding that everybody can comprehend, rather than letting it be understood just by the specialists. But I could bring this out after 1 year of work. Staying faithful to the context of the book, submitting this book on behalf of the community was my biggest wish. In order to bring simplicity, I worked meticulously to compile an index of plant names together with their latinized forms which are sorted in alphabetical order and also an alphabetical index of diseases. I got opinion and also support from doctors and experts in Phytotherapists. I left the explanations as they are since i didn’t want to make any extra additions to the book. If a detailed survey of the plants is carried out, there is more detailed information in the literature about how they should be used. We can already see that the modern medicine finds out solutions to many diseases but nevertheless, there are still dozens of diseases which can not be healed. For instance, in this work, Ibn Sina explains the reason of why he has named a plant as “Swallow-wort” as follows: Sometimes the newborn nestlings of a swallow suffer from blindness. It was observed that the mother squeezes the extract of this plant onto their babies’eyelids and then their eyes were healed. All the same, if this kind of plants are examined throughly, it is quite possible to observe the same effect on humans as well. In this case, i call upon the expert scientist, to carry out these researches. At the end of this book, i added also some basic methods of practical home care medicine which are used in traditional medicine. I believe that these will be found useful and practical. I hope that this will be useful for humanity... Caner OZOGUL (Herbalist)

After hearing a secret that could help her win a dress design contest, Berry the Fruit Fairy struggles with whether or not to use this information to cheat.

Sweet tea, corn bread and soup beans; everyday fare for eight-year-old Alix French, the precocious darling of a respected southern family. But nothing was ordinary about the day she met ten-year-old Nick Anderson, a boy from the wrong side of town. Armed with only a tin of bee balm and steely determination, Alix treats the raw evidence of a recent beating that mars his back, an act that changes both their lives forever. Through childhood disasters and teenage woes they cling together as friendship turns to love. The future looks rosy until the fateful night when Frank Anderson, Nick's abusive father, is shot to death in his filthy trailer.Suddenly, Nick is gone, leaving Alix alone, confused and pregnant. For the next fifteen years she wrestles with the pain of Nick's abandonment, a bad marriage, her family and friends. But finally, she's starting to get her life back together. Her divorce is almost final, her business is booming, and she's content if not happy-until the day she looks up and sees Nick standing across the counter. He's back, and he's not alone. Once again Alix is plunged into turmoil and pain as Nick tries to win her love, something she resists with all her strength. Only one thing might break the protective wall she's built around her emotions-the truth about Frank Anderson's death. But when that truth comes out and those walls crumble, neither Alix nor Nick is prepared for the emotional explosion that could destroy as well as heal.

Dreaming is vital to the human story. It is essential to our survival and evolution, to creative endeavors in every field, and, quite simply, to getting us through our daily lives. All of us dream. Now Robert Moss shows us how dreams have shaped world events and why deepening our conscious engagement with dreaming is crucial for our future. He traces the strands of dreams through archival records and well-known writings, weaving remarkable yet true accounts of historical figures who were influenced by their dreams. In this wide-ranging, visionary book, Moss creates a new way to explore history and consciousness, combining the storytelling skills of a bestselling novelist with the research acumen of a scholar of ancient history and the personal experience of an active dreamer.

King Darrow sends Aidan Errolson on an impossible quest, hoping he will never return, and although Aidan has enough friends to succeed on the journey, even he might not be able to defeat the powerful enemy that awaits him at its end.

Told with love and a profound appreciation for a time, place and people, this series of engaging vignettes explores six years in the life of a young girl in 1930s Florida. Nameless and faceless, the little girl wanders through these stories filled with curiosity and questions as she meets the ingenious people of the Great Depression in rural Florida. Although an outsider, she is quickly accepted by this strong, struggling and kindly community. She shares their simple joys, great tragedies and dark secrets. The rich tales in Sweetgum Slough are about the sweet and earthy roots of learning. While these stories are, indeed, about joy and hookworms and red-taled fishes, they are more about a child's need for freedom to adventure, choose paths, take risks, examine and question. Claire Karssiens's memoir is as unique as it is memorable. Her lyrical prose and stunning imagery beautifully capture 1930s Florida and will sweep you into the very heart of a little girl's soul.

Note: Although this book is listed as biography/autobiography, it is actually FOLKLORE from the Midland Region of the United States and can be considered as Americana and nostalgia. Elizabeth Pearl Lowe Boyd (1904 - 1965) grew up on farms in Warren County, Kentucky, near Bowling Green. Unlike many girls of that era, she went on from the rural, one-room school to graduate from what is now Western Kentucky University (a degree in English and Latin). After a year of teaching in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, she moved to Cross City, Florida, where she taught another year and married Robert U. Boyd, a railroad agent. By 1935 they had settled in Dunedin, Florida, where they raised their eight children. From 1936 until her death, she wrote a popular column in the local weekly paper, The Dunedin Times, titled "From My Kitchen Window." The topics she wrote about were many and varied, and her focus was on the ordinary and commonplace. Over two hundred of these articles were about her recollections of growing up in rural Kentucky, and they were selected for this book. Although Florida had become her home, her heart remained in Kentucky. It was there, for that sweet land and for the hills and seasons, that she felt deeply attached. She never lost her yearnings for the hills, for the agrarian life of Kentucky. And it was of rural people, life, times, and history that she wrote most eloquently. Pearl Lowe Boyd (the name she went by) was energetic, jolly, determined and focused, civic minded, and above all, a mother. She spread her children out over twenty-two years, and she was fascinated by her little ones, their beauty, their trust, their development and their emergence into big people. Writing was the forum through which she best expressed herself - the same as music is for a musician. In her earliest writings and diaries she stated her desires to be a writer. Her opinions were carefully thoughtful, erudite, and tactfully voiced. The only time I remember that she got her dander up and went on an all-out crusade was when she got wind that the town leaders were planning to have an enormous, beautiful oak tree behind the Chamber of Commerce cut down. They lost, she won, and the tree is standing today. She loved to read and kept lists of books she devoured - sometimes over a hundred in a year's span. Yet her own mother was opposed to education beyond the eighth grade for a farm girl and was very much disapproving of her reading novels - even the writings by Dickens. It was her father who encouraged her education and her love of books and writing. She was the kind of person who looked for the good in things, in people, in nature, and in life. Although she had periods of worry and depression, she never let them slow her down. The reasoning behind her positive outlook, which she described to me during one of my down times, was pragmatic and positive: why choose to dwell on the hurtful and the bad when one can live much more effectively by dwelling on the beautiful, the exciting, and the good of life? She grew up during Women's Suffrage. As an early feminist, she insisted on fairness in all things for women as for men, yet in her own life she was comfortable with first being a had-working housewife and mother and being a civic leader and writer second. Among her homespun articles she also wrote blistering articles against the treatment of Jews and others during World War II and against bigotry during the early days of desegregation. The "n" word was certainly not permitted in her home. I remember her as a wise person. On one occasion when two of her children were arguing over splitting up a remaining chunk of cake, she utilized the King Solomon ploy by allowing one to make the slice and the other to take the first piece. Of course, the two pieces were precisely identical. Music was a part of our lives with