I grew up on a 50-acre farm in the small rural community of Catawissa, Missouri, as the sixth of seven children. My parents, Archie and Altha, often ______ during meals how everything on the table came from the ______.

Besides running the farm, Dad was also a ______. In the fall of 1970, he was working on a house when the ladder broke ______. His back was fractured in two places an ______ needed rescue.

He stayed in the hospital for three weeks,______ his back to align (校准) correctly so the bones would ______ perfectly.

On Thanksgiving, Dad was still in the hospital. We always butchered pigs the day after the holiday so that we had enough pork ______ for the next year, and that year my uncle ______ with a couple of cousins to help my three older brothers prepare our year’s supply.

After Dad returned home, he was in a back brace, saddened for ______ to work. Worse still, the doctor told us his chance of complete recovery was ______. I was too young to realize our family had no money coming ______ as Christmas approached.

One night we heard a car coming up the long driveway. Always ______ to company, we kids were curious about who was visiting.

Peggy Phelan was at the door, holding an envelope ______ with money which, according to her account, she had ______ in the community. And she was there to ______ it!

Dad tried to ______ but Peggy would have none of it. I can still hear her saying, “Archie, whenever someone’s baler (压捆机) is broken, you bale their hay. Every time someone passes away, Altha is cooking. It’s our ______.”

That evening, I understood what being a good neighbor was, and that ______ my parents were good neighbors,   their ______ would be paid back.

There was a time I had to count every single penny I spent. I had to keep a _______ in my head while shopping. I would stand there and _______ things up over and over again. It was during the holidays when I was _______ at Trader Joe’s because it had the most gluten-free (无麸质的) food and I had a little child _______ diagnosed with celiac disease (脂泻病). I stood in the frozen food area adding everything up.

The total was too _______. I couldn’t buy everything. I didn’t want my credit card to be _______ . I looked through everything trying to _______ what to put back. I _______ everything everyone else loved, but put back the one thing I loved, which was a simple frozen _______ of chicken meat. But it was what put the total over __________.

I __________ the feeling of not being able to __________ that $3.29 package of chicken. But that was life and I __________ and forgot about it. It was what I had to do.

That night our __________ rang. It was __________ because it was extremely cold and late. I went to the door, opened it, and on my front steps were bags of __________ On the top of the first bag, I saw the chicken meat, the __________ kind I had put back hours ago.

I still have no idea who put all of that food on my doorstep. I cannot describe the feeling of realizing that even in __________ I wasn’t alone. My kids were so __________ about all the delicious food. My heart was filled with the feeling of __________. At that moment I knew I was not alone.

I grew up in a house where the TV was seldom turned on. With one wall in my bedroom entirely ______ with bookshelves, most of my childhood was ______ on books I could get hold of. In fact, I grew up thinking of reading as ______ as breathing and books unbelievably powerful in ______ perspectives (观点) by creating worlds we could step into, take part in and live in.

With this ______ belief, I, at fourteen, decided to become a writer. Here too, reading became ________. Every writer starts off ______ that he has something to say, but being unable to find the _______ ways to say it. He has to find his own voice by reading widely and ______ which parts of the writers he agrees or disagrees with, or agrees with so strongly that it ______ his own world. He cannot write without loving to read, ______ only through reading other people’s writing can one discover what works, what doesn’t and, in the end, together with lots of practice, what voice he has.

Now I am in college, and have come to realize how ______ it is to read fiction (文学作品)．As a law student, my reading is in fact ______ to subject matter—the volume of what I have to read for classes every week ______ there is little time to read anything else. Such reading made it all the ______ to me that I live in a very small part in this great place called ______. Reading fiction ______ me that there is life beyond my own. It allows me to travel ______ the high seas and along the Silk Road, all from the ______ of my own armchair, to experience, though secondhand, exciting experiences that I wouldn’t   ______ be able to have in my lifetime.