pugsy checking for night visitors

Dogs have an ability we don't have, they can smell the ground for pass traffic. We had a cold night last night. down to the 20's by day light.

I made it to the library and brought home 18 books so I am reading full speed ahead.
I read Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons. Oprah has her book club on it which means little to me since I don't usual seek Oprah's option for my choice of reading material .
This book Is a slim little volume having only 145 pages but I enjoyed it or perhaps that isn't the right word choice but it held my attention .
Ellen Foster Gibbons published Ellen Foster, which she based on her own nightmarish childhood experiences. When Gibbons was only ten years old, her mother committed suicide by overdosing on medication. Like Gibbons, Ellen too is only ten years old when her mother kills herself by ingesting an entire bottle of pills. Also autobiographical is Gibbons's portrayal of Ellen's father, who eventually drinks himself to death, as Gibbons's own alcoholic father did. In Ellen Foster, Gibbons fictionalizes her true life search for a loving home. Like Ellen, Gibbons found such a home with a foster mother after suffering much abuse by her cruel, self-involved relatives.
When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy." So begins the tale of Ellen Foster, the brave and engaging heroine of Kay Gibbons's first novel, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Institute of Arts and Letters. Wise, funny, affectionate, and true, Ellen Foster is, as Walker Percy called it, "The real thing. Which is to say, a lovely, sometimes heartwrenching novel. . . . [Ellen Foster] is as much a part of the backwoods South as a Faulkner character—and a good deal more endearing."