Sheba's belly hung lower every day with the burgeoning life of growing puppies. Meanwhile, Bruno, my tired, beloved St. Bernard, grew weaker and feebler. We didn't allow him to follow me out on my walks anymore. He could hardly keep his back end upright for more than a few minutes at first; as time went on, he could lift the swaying dead weight of the hips and rear legs up for only a second or two before they collapsed under him. Sweet Bruno wasn't a whiner though...he never got crabby as some dogs in chronic pain would. Occasionally he would manage to get out of the house (where he was now allowed to stay despite Denis' ban on indoor pets, simply because he was so old and in such bad shape, and besides, he never got into anything) and would try to follow me. I'd look back and see the trusty old dog dragging his hindquarters through the snow as fast as he could, trying to catch up with me, leaving the snow smeared with blood in his wake. The most heartbreaking thing about it was that he seemed to think it was worthwhile to go through all that just to be with me. Ah, to be truly worthy of such love and devotion....Getting him back to the house was just as bad because he was far too big for me to carry. It became clear that his days were dwindling and I spent a lot of time brushing out his thick coat while he lay on a blanket next to the woodstove. And then one day he was just gone. They said he'd followed me on one of my walks and didn't return, but I later found out they'd taken him out and shot him to put him out of his pain. It was the kindest thing to do, but I think we both deserved a chance to say goodbye.

I loved Bruno more than any dog I'd had before and more than any I've had since. In his absence, I curled up with Sheba on the floor and felt the puppies writhing within her. I prayed and prayed that one of them would be Bruno's, just one. I tried to imagine what it might look like, which one of the wiggling lumps might be his puppy. I asked Mom and Denis if I could keep one of the puppies if it was his, but they couldn't imagine how one of them could be his, anyway. Mike/Raphah smirked knowingly at me behind their backs...I made a face at him.

Mark came up to the Lake for the weekend (indeed, I'd seen his headlights from my bedroom window as I stayed up late with my books and microscope). Mom and Denis had been acting sort of weird about Mark lately. I couldn't quite figure it out.Anyway, they admired him and it was nice to have intelligent, cultured company, so Mom wanted to make him a cake, and I wanted to learn how to cook. The trouble was, we had almost nothing to bake with. There was almost no flour, no butter, none of the things you need to make a cake. So under her instruction, I made a cake with farina and only a very small amount of flour. We used some of our own plum jam (made with free plums people didn't want to pick last fall) to drizzle over the bundt-shaped cake after it was done, and it looked pretty nice. After dinner (which was probably just lentil soup or venison stew, but Mark never complained, being always a gracious guest) we gave him the first piece. He liked it so well he wanted the recipe, and Mom and I were left looking at one another helplessly, for we couldn't have made another just like it if we tried!

At times I grew very depressed, feeling stifled and constantly controlled to the nth degree by our family and our increasingly constrictive beliefs. Outside of our family, Mark was the only person I had to talk to. Only, it was funny, these things didn't need to be said. He somehow knew and understood. Mike/Raphah and I clung to him as if to a life preserver, even though we were silent much of the time and rarely disclosed much in the way of forbidden family secrets (in other words, anything at all). On one occasion, we were riding in his car, and I was so depressed that I was thinking to myself that it would be easier to die. But I didn't say so. Out of the silence, Mark started talking about how sometimes it was harder to live than to die, but that it was worthwhile to live. This sort of silent understanding, an ability to see beyond the facades, to say what mattered and to comfort us when we needed it most, endeared us to him.

Remembering to use our new names took some getting used to. It was particularly difficult to get other people to use the new names. Mark was an exception. He adapted with very little argument or explanation, probably having already decided our parents were crazy. The prophecy about Baby Eliyah was a much more difficult issue, especially for people who knew that Mom's tubes were tied.
Other things were changing, too. The landlord was visiting us a lot, having what seemed to be serious discussions with our parents which we were not permitted to listen to. More importantly from our family's perspective, the prophecies hadn't stopped with our new names and the news of Baby Eliyah. We were all frequently employed to pray and ask Yahweh about answers to various questions. Often we didn't even know what the question was, they would just tell us to go ask Yahweh what to do. We didn't need to know the question because He knew it. I had a harder time hearing Yahweh than the others. Even when I thought I might hear something, I suspected it was my own imagination, imagining what might get me out of the predicament of waiting in a quiet room for a hour or two trying to come up with answers to questions I didn't know of. I began imagining Yahweh telling us that our trials on earth were really pretty trivial in the greater scheme of things, and that we should simply praise him for the wonderful things he would do for us, and for the small blessings we had. A typical reply of this nature might read:

"Behold, my beloved children, why do you worry about things of the world? Do I not care for all of creation? Trust ye me not? I say unto thee, not a sparrow falls to the ground, nor doth a balde of grass groweth without my knowledge of it. Trust ye in me, my children! Sing praises unto me and be glad! Thus saith Yahweh thy Creator and father."

This got me off the hook of agonizing over answers, worrying whether I was hearing my own mind, tormented by parental stress and pressure, or Yahweh, or maybe it was Satan or an evil spirit trying to deceive us. If I wrote down a false reply, I would be a false prophet deserving of death. My sister Sarah had far more fruitful results, a fact which was not lost on my parents. She was considered more obedient and closer to Yahweh even before the prophecies started. My new name, Rebekah, meant "to bind with beauty", but the common translation was "yoke", and they often agreed that I was definitely a yoke and a burden, even when introducing me to people we'd just met. "This is Rebekah. Her name means yoke, she has a rebellious spirit and is a burden". They felt I was rebellious because I always, continuously, thought outside of the box they wanted to cram me into. They spent a lot of time trying to cast the rebellious spirit out of me.
I didn't realize it at the time, but our situation was becoming increasingly desperate and untenable. Denis couldn't seem to find a job, Mom never looked for one, the rent was a few months late, and our frozen bread, TVP, dried foods, and the venison Mark shot for us was virtually all we had to eat...except for the omnipresent lentils and oatmeal. Still, Denis found a way to have his coffee, his eggs cooked in real butter and his steak, all served, of course, on his favorite plate with the silverware that only he was allowed to use.

One might have thought that our descent into paranoia about objects as innocent as stuffed bunnies and children's clothing printed with hearts, coupled with frantic prayers on a regular basis to keep evil spirits away, was about as kooky as people could get. That would be incorrect. We were in fact merely on the edge of a precipice, but we didn't know that. We thought everyone else was misguided. After all, the Bible has a lot to say about a path so narrow that few would find it, that many would claim to know Jesus (oops, Yahshua) only to be cast into the lake of fire. We knew that many were called and few are chosen, and we were absolutely certain that we were the chosen ones. It could have been that the stress of our life was getting to all of us. Maybe we'd read the story of Samuel a few too many times. Perhaps we were taking the Bible too literally.

It was evening, and we were all in our rooms. My sisters were probably listening to Amy Grant and chatting about girl stuff. I was probably reading a book or drawing. We didn't hear anyone call Mike. But he did. He ran downstairs, but Denis claimed he hadn't called him. By the third time, both Mike and Denis were frustrated. But then Denis thought of the boy Samuel. He instructed Mike to go back upstairs. If anyone called him this time, he should stay there, and say "Here am I", and listen closely. Mike obeyed these odd directions, went back upstairs...and was soon back down again, breathless.
"He said, Your name is!" Mike gasped. Mom and Denis waited, but that was all Mike said.
"Your name is what?" , they asked.
"I don't know, he didn't say! He just said your name is".

So they told him to return upstairs and wait for the rest. When he came back downsatirs, slowly, he looked puzzled. He asked if Raphah was a name. They weren't sure, so they looked it up. It was. It meant "heals" as in, "Yahweh heals". It was decided that Yahweh had spoken to Mike and his name was to be changed to Raphah. We all wondered whether Mike's name was the only one to be changed. Would the rest of us get new names, too? The Bible said we would. We were all instructed to go to our rooms and pray to see what our names were.
I wasn't big on the idea of hearing voices. How would I know if it were my own thoughts or not? Usually when they wanted me to pray for an answer, all I heard was silence and my own worrying fears about what would happen if I came back down with no answer at all. So I asked for the name to show on the first page the Bible randomly opened to. If no female names were on that page, obviously I wouldn't be getting a new name. The Bible opened to the story of Rebekah in Genesis. Was Rebekah my name? I tried it again, and again the book opened to that page. I went downstairs and told them my name was Rebekah. They told me they already knew, Lisa, who would be Sarah now, had heard that Rebekah was my new name. Gia was now Rachel. Mom went from Mary to Miriam, and Denis was now Eliyah, a name which pleased him mightily since he related to the fierce, judgmental prophet Elijah.

Since Lisa/Sarah was good at hearing from Yahweh, they had other questions for her. The rest of us were to retire to our room and give thanks for our new names and sing praises to Yahweh for gracing us with these gifts. The excitement was so keen that nobody could sleep. There was a lot of whispering and quiet talking downstairs between Mom, Denis, and Sarah. A few days later, the news was broken to the rest of us: another prophecy had been received.

The prophecy stated that Mom was going to have another baby. This in itself would have been miraculous, since her tubes had been tied years ago, but it didn't stop there. This baby was going to be special. He was going to be the prophet Elijah reborn in the flesh. The book of Malachi states that before the end, Yahweh will send the prophet Elijah. The end times were near, and Yahweh was sending the prophet Elijah- to us! To our family! We were beside ourselves with jubilation. The prophecy also stated that we were to notify all of our friends and family of this news, so that it would be a sign to them, and that it would also be an indication that our names truly had been changed. Mom promptly wrote up the letters and had us all sign with our new names. We sent them to all our our family. Oh, and one other detail: we were to have complete faith, we must not doubt for a second, that baby Eliyah was coming to us.

I'd been interested in science since early childhood, learning dinosaur names, collecting insects, picking apart leaf buds and flowers, and reading my grandfather's old medical books while my peers played house or dressed their dolls. I'd wanted to be a doctor and an artist ever since I could remember. It wasn't until I met Mark that it occurred to me that I could be a scientist, possibly because he was the first one I'd met (or the first that I knew of). Looking back on my days of reading Discover and National Geographic so avidly, or poring over a very thick book on Arctic wildlife, it should have.

At any rate, our association with Mark fanned the sparks of my interest into an inferno, as tyically happens with my interests. Unfortunately, I had only very limited resources to feed it: a set of children's encyclopedias, a very few books, a high school biology text, my old microscope, and of course, the great outdoors. I stayed up late every night with that biology book, which had a lot about environmental issues, zoology, human physiology, and what drugs do to the body, but neglected more fundamental biology (it may have been that the basics were taught in an earlier text). It wasn't uncommon for me to go through 2-3 chapters a day, which included carefully doing all the homework on paper, even though there was no one there to grade it. I started collecting plants and pressing them. I had no idea what they were, but I paid a lot of attention to where and how they grew. I read a biography of Marie Curie written by her daughter and thought about how wonderful it would be to devote oneself to science like that. The microscope was used until my eyes ached. Then I decided I'd like to memorize the periodic table, and so I found a spare sheet of posterboard and started copying it down in hopes of hanging it up in my room and learning it. When Denis saw this, he asked me about it. His response was that he admired my intentions, but it was impossible for me to memorize the periodic table, I was wasting my time. Besides, I was going to be a wife someday, why did I need to know it? So I obediently stopped, flipped the posterboard over, and painstakingly wrote down some passage of the Bible instead...wishing the entire time that it were possible for me to memorize the periodic table.

On the home front, life was growing even more difficult. We ran completely out of food. Mike and I nibbled furtively on our stores of dried apple slices. We walked our trails in the woods and tried to kill things with our slingshots, praying to Yahweh for success so that our family could eat. Sheba killed a grouse and we somehow got it from her. It wasn't very much meat. We got a rabbit the same way, but couldn't eat rabbit- it was unclean. I think we made it into dog food. Just when things were getting really desperate, Mom and Denis went to the food bank. In addition to the food box we usually got, they gave us about 40 packages of bread, cans of TVP, and large cans of freeze dried foods. Denis also got a really good deal on lentils from some farmer and bought 100 pounds of lentils. When Mark saw how little we had to eat, he shot a deer for us. Without that venison, we would have had to eat lentil soup every day and possibly for breakfast, had we run out of oatmeal. And of course, we still had some plum jam and orange marmalade to spread on the dry toasted bread (there was no butter) and to eat with the oatmeal (there was no milk to speak of, either). Even the dogs ate lentil soup, since we couldn't afford to buy dog food.

Mark was more than a friend to us; he was a window into a world we'd never seen before. His presence was an escape from the complex, overbearing, and irrational belief system that dictated our every move, which isn't to say that we disobeyed our beliefs when we were with him. It was more like we could forget about them and just be kids again for a change, because life was growing ever more complicated at home. And then, in the middle of all this, we received word that my Dad and Uncle Charlie were coming to visit us.

There must have been a lot of stress relating to the visit, but I don't remember. We were expecting them one winter morning, and I was out walking on one of the small side roads that led to our house when a tiny blue car came down the road. The men inside it didn't look like locals, they were acting funny and smiling a lot for no apparent reason (as it turned out, they weren't used to driving a stick shift and were vastly amused by the small size of the car). I remarked to Mike that the guys looked funny, and he agreed. We watched the car as it went past us. It turned the corner and pulled in at our house! It was then that I realized that the men were my Dad and uncle Charlie.

Seeing him in the same space as my mom was truly suureal. He and Charlie seemed to like the log cabin, and admired it. I went to get my drawing to show them how my art had progressed, but they seemed only slightly interested in it, perhaps because I had handed them approximately a ream of drawings. The climate in the house was awkward, so before long we were invited to go out for pizza with them. We'd never eaten at the local pizza shack, and so this seemed incredibly luxurious to us. However, it also prompted the subject of our newfound religious beliefs, which were cause for concern in the Hill family. A debate over old testament food laws ensued, and the result must have been something of a truce, because we wound up eating a pizza without pork. Still, having to defend the beliefs that had been more or less imposed upon us was stressful. The only way to hold up under life with Mom and Denis was to commit to the same things that they did.

The visit went quickly. Charlie said he loved the area's beauty, that it reminded him of what the world of Narnia would look like. I was quiet...the CS Lewis books had been forbidden as Satanic, and I'd been forced to burn them. They met Mark, and he and my dad seemed to take a dislike to one another, especially after my dad asked questions that Mark considered personal. After a short cross country ski, they went back to Illinois. I hated to see uncle Charlie go. If there was one person who could have persuaded me to return to the midwest, it would have been him; but of course, he was in college now and I would hardly see him. Instead, it would be the same old thing with my Dad and Marie trying to mold me into a perfectly feminine, ladylike, city girl.

On one of my first visits to Mark's house, I knocked on the glass door of his little A frame cabin and saw through the window that he was watching basketball on his T.V.. We weren't allowed to watch T.V. anymore, but I was so engrossed in other interests that I really didn't miss it. What surprised me was that he was watching it with the volume turned all the way down.
"I like to watch them", he said. "They're so graceful, they remind me of ballet dancers". I looked at the screen. They were graceful. I hadn't noticed that before. He didn't seem to mind my intrusion into his quiet world at all, in fact seemed happy that I'd come to visit. I observed my surroundings while he went to get me a soda, another item that I hadn't experienced in some time. The cabin was neat, spartan without seeming ascetic. The decorations and furnishings were just enough to lend interest without adding clutter. The earmarks of a careful, frugal person were everywhere. I don't remember what we talked about, only that I had an immediate affinity for the man. His presence was quiet and reassuring while maintaining that sharp edge of intelligence, yet it was all well peppered with humor and good naturedness. You could be silent without feeling awkward.
Mike knocked on the door, and with the addition of his impish comapny the conversation became more animated, and for me, mroe awkward. Mike was constantly making me feel stupid, and had picked up many of Denis's taunts and ridicules. Most of the time though, our new friend was more interesting than teasing me. We told him of our plans to tarp a deer with some sort of trap so that we could train it to let us ride it. Mike and I had spent hours discussing just how to do this, because we both missed the horses in Naples. To our surprise, Mark shook his head sadly and said that the deer struggled enough to get by, that we should leave them alone. He countered this disappointmenet by asking us questions so that we told him how we'd ridden horses, the other animals we'd had, and so on. Mark liked animals, and seemed to have a soft spot for poor old Bruno, saying the the mere sight of the harmless old Saint Bernard would be enough to deter would be theives and trespassers. We learned that because of his work, he travelled quite a bit, and had spent time overseas, a detail which made him even more fascinating to us.
The next time we went to visit Mark, he had a gift for me, a Horse Illustrated magazine. I was ecstatic; the cover featured a Palomino stallion, and Palominos were just the sort of horse I'd wanted to have someday. I read that magazine from cover to cover over and over again until I knew most of the advertisements as well as the articles. He took us to the sled dog races nearby, an event we wouldn't have been able to go to otherwise, and we got to help hold the dogs from running before it was time for them to start. He was fixing the fibergalss shell on his snowmobile, and said that once it was through, he'd take us for rides on it. He took out his former wife's skis and lent them to me, so that instead of walking everywhere through the snow, I could ski, gliding along silently. And whenever we went there, he had a store of just the type of soda we liked best.

As it turned out, none of the people I'd imagined had left the gifts on our porch. Our benefactor was a man living nearby. Mike and I had frequently trespassed onto his land and peered at his house. We'd decided long ago that he was a cranky, mean old man that might yell at us, even though we'd never seen this fictional character. It was reason enough not to linger too long around the house, which was nearly always empty.

In fact, the man sitting at our kitchen table and drinking coffee with our parents was in his late thirties, with the first hints of male pattern baldness emerging from his sandy colored hair. His eyes sparkled with extreme intelligence and wit. His lean and muscular frame leaned forward slightly whether he stood or sat, as though he were used to hunching over papers and keyboards for hours on end, which he was, for Mark was a scientist. We quickly took to this kindly stranger, especially Mike and me. He also like animals, and we showed him our cats and dogs, and tried to set him up with one of the puppies Sheba was still pregnant with. The man was fascinating. First of all, he was totally unlike Denis, and secondly, he was very patient, quiet, knowledgable about a wide array of subjects and he told us when he thought something was B.S., very politely of course. He didn't seem to get tired of us and we could ask him a lot of questions, for which he seemed to know most of the answers. Mom wanted us to push our beliefs on to him, and since he was such a wonderful person, we agreed that we didn't want him to go to hell. When we told him some of what we believed, he inclined his head at an angle, seeming interested, skeptical and perhaps fascinated by our strange belief system. He was well mannered enough not to tell us that our beliefs were baloney.
I was to first one to brave the path to his cabin and knock on his door, and Mike quickly followed. We liked him so well that we spent as much time with him as we could.