I love reporting small-town news. And this photo might be why.

One summer when we were kids, my sister and I read so many books at our town library that we made the local newspaper. 

That was cool.

I remember meeting the photographer at the library, and how instead of just snapping our photo, he asked to stack up a bunch of books to make the shot more interesting. As a third-grader I hadn't yet learned the term "grip and grin" that newsrooms used to describe static photos of people holding trophies or donation checks, but I could appreciate that this photographer was trying to be creative. And it was certainly fun to stand next to a tower of  books taller than us kids, as the big grin on my face can attest.

My sister (left) was 10 and I was 8.

I don't remember the skirt I am wearing in the photo; I remember being such a tomboy that I never wore skirts or blouses, so maybe I was talked into dressing up that day. But I do remember those tennis shoes. They were the first brand-name shoes I owned because my father got them cheap at a fire sale: A local store had literally sold off its inventory after a fire, but those shoes were perfectly good except for a small melted spot and some soot.

My sister and I had fallen in love with books and the places they could take you when my mother read to us each night at our bunk beds. I especially remember her reading the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and how we would beg her every night to read another chapter.

Once I could read for myself, I lived at the library during the summer, checking out all the books I could at a time and begging my mother to let me stay up longer to read them. Then sneaking a flashlight into my room when she wouldn't.

Once school started again I lived for three things: The days we had Fiesta Pizza, a strange mix of pizza and tostada served on soft dough shaped like a Stop sign; the day my teacher handed out the new Scholastic book catalogs that I poured over to carefully choose as many as my mother would let me buy; and, finally, the day the boxes of new books came into the classroom and I could bring all mine home.

I'll bet reading 100 books one summer wasn't even a big number for me, but as the only kids we knew who didn't have a television set in our house, my sister and I easily read more books than the other kids signed up for the library's reading program that summer. So we made the paper that year in what newsrooms call "refrigerator news": Something that parents, or in our case, my grandmother, cut out of the paper and put on the fridge.

Decades later, I was in my first job as a full-time reporter at a small newspaper near Seattle that published twice a week. And one of my favorite tasks there was compiling a page called "Scene and Heard," which featured all the "grip-and-grin" photos people sent in of graduations, engagements and even the hole-in-one they just made at the golf course. 

But I knew it was very important to someone, so I loved trying to crop the photos and wordsmith the information to make it as exciting and attractive as possible -- never forgetting that photographer who made my first refrigerator news more interesting.

And I knew he came with me on every writing assignment, too, when my editor paid me a rare compliment after I returned from what could have been the most static of stories: A small group of senior citizens standing around practicing dialogue for an upcoming play reading at the local Senior Center.

The photographer I was with could have taken a very boring photo of people standing in a small, windowless room reading from scripts. But he got up close to one man, carefully angling the shot to create a dynamic photo of him reading with a great expression on his face.

When the story and photos were done, my editor flipped off his light and hurried out of his office to his car as usual, but as he passed my desk he said, with no trace of sarcasm, "You got far more out of that than I ever could."

I smiled. It was the first completely unsolicited feedback I had gotten from him; but more importantly, I knew I was doing for others what that photographer had done for my family: Painting even the smallest achievements of others in the best light I could.