One night, the dogs barked too much, and Dad got fed up. He loaded the three male dogs into the truck and drove a long way away, and left them on the side of the road. I worried about what would become of them, but as it turned out, the dogs were smarter than we'd given them credit for. Over the next day or two, everyone was upset about what he'd done. Then he went driving to Priest Lake one day and the dogs heard his truck and met it alongside the road, Kodiak in the lead, grinning and wagging his tail. He brought them back. Meanwhile, Sheba had her puppies. Doug and Donna picked a pretty tricolored female, named her Princess, and took her home at 4 weeks old. We named and trained the rest as I always had, by tossing nuggets of dog food and training the puppies to catch the food in mid air, and then tossing it only to the puppies who sat down on command, and most of them found homes. Two did not, Happy and Shy, both males, both almost solid black, both named for their dispositions. I loved Shy; he never caused any trouble, and I enjoyed earning his trust rather than simply having it handed to me. Happy's enthusiasm for life was infectious. They were both good dogs. When Happy and Shy were a few months old, all the adult dogs went running off as they often did. They didn't come back. I hoped they'd find a way back as they had before, but we never saw them again. Now it was just Happy and Shy, and after a while, Shy found a home and then it was just Happy.

The gap in our dog population was quickly filled, though. Dad was driving one day when he saw a dog wandering alongside the highway, a black Cocker Spaniel. It looked lost, so he brought him home. As soon as he brought the dog home, it promptly pooped on the floor. Dad announced that whoever cleaned the poop up could have the dog. I didn't any pets now, and no one else wanted to clean up the poop, so I promptly cleaned up the mess and claimed my new dog. I called him Curly. Curly was sort of irritable. He acted as though he wasn't used to being in a family with children. If you touched him near his rear end, he'd growl. He needed a companion, and so did I. It didn't take me very much work or time with him before he was friendly and calm with me. He and Happy became the best of friends. They'd romp around in the snow, Curly grabbing Happy's long tail, and Happy glomming onto Curly's long ears, as his tail had been docked. Curly turned from a crotchety old dog into a relaxed, pleasant, family dog. The change in him was so dramatic that we decided to change his name to Sonny. Sonny was allowed to stay indoors at night, because he seemed less hardy than Happy and the other dogs we'd had. Even Dad liked him.

Have I mentioned how cold that house was in the winter? The bathtub was freezing, icy cold, and not being able to immerse ourselves in hot water meant that we shivered all the way through the sponge bath. Because water was so limited, baths were in demand. Because it was so incredibly cold in there, Raphah and I gladly deferred to others who wanted a bath, if we could get away with it. Even after you got out and stood by the woodstove, it was still cold. If you turned your back to the stove, your front got cold, and vice versa. We hardly ever went anywhere anyway, but it is still a little shocking to recall times when he or I took a bath once a month, or even less often.

There were exceptions, however. Rachel had a nasty habit of neglecting to empty the pot, even when asked. By the time she complied, it would be pretty full, and then she'd complain that it was too heavy for her to dump, which it was by then. This aggravated Raphah and I, since we were the ones who inevitably had to take up the slack, but there was no point in complaining. She was the baby of the family, and she acted so innocent about it.

On one such occasion, she had allowed the pot to fill right up to the rim. Mom asked me to dump it. I griped and pointed out that if she'd emptied it several times, starting in mid morning, this would never happen, and that the overly full bucket, only on her days, was beginning to seem like a pattern, but it was no use arguing. The pot was full and somebody, me, had to dump it. By now it was dark, but the light of the moon shone on the snow, so I didn't need a flashlight. I was so used to not seeing things that visibility didn't matter that much anyway.

I held the pot gingerly away from my body and walked slowly, smoothly, carefully, out the door, so as not to slosh any of it on myself. The slightest bump would send it splashing out. Down the front steps, no spills, no sloshing. Suddenly my left foot hit an unexpected patch of ice! I went down, the bucket went up, and the contents came down- all over me. I must have wailed, because the front door opened quickly, and the whole family appeared at the doorway. I was covered in sewage. It was splattered on my glasses, on my face, soppy toilet paper hung from my hair...it was horrible beyond words. My clothes were soaked through with the stinking mess. Rachel pushed between the others, caught sight of me and began laughing hysterically. The others looked absolutely horrified and awestruck. Dad told me I had to strip down, right there in front of the house, in the snow, and leave my clothes outside. Kettles of water were put on to boil. Someone must have shoveled up the mess. I washed, and washed, and scrubbed and lathered, and I still felt contaminated. I shampooed my hair four times in a row and felt as though I would never be truly clean again. After that, when it was Rachel's day for the pot, I got onto her case early in the day. I didn't ever want to experience anything like that again.

Christmas came and went as though it didn't exist, except that my Father and Marie sent Sarah and I gold necklaces with pendants. The pendants were stars of David. In the center of the star was a cross. They were beautiful and I loved my necklace, but Mom didn't like the crosses; crosses were evil pagan symbols. She told us to call our Father and complain about his gifts, to see if he could send us some without the crosses. I hated making that phone call. She stood nearby and wrote stuff down that we had to say. Finally he told us to send the necklaces back to him; we did. Mom told me that it was just as well, because gold wasn't my color anyway. I was only allowed to wear things that were silver in color. I felt sickened about the rejected gifts. I knew it must have hurt his feelings. Mom made us write letters to our entire family begging them not to send us presents for our birthdays or Christmas and frankly, after this incident, it wasn't hard to do.

We had very few clothes, and what we did have tended to be in bad condition, especially if the clothes were used to work outside in. My jeans were consistently wearing out at the knees and thighs (from lifting rounds of firewood onto my thighs to get them up to torso/chest height to carry). We had limited winter clothing, and now that winter had come, riding in the back of the truck had become quite the chilling experience, especially when we hauled water. The barrels would slosh any water from their rims onto us, and we didn't have blankets to protect us from the wind, either. Socks and underwear were limited commodities, and the flannel shirts i worked in....well, they were worn to the point of being the thickness of toilet paper.

I mean, we coped with these obstacles. When we worked outside, we routinely wore long underwear, two or three pairs of socks, and two pairs of jeans, and long underwear, flannel shirts, a wool sweater or sweatshirt under our coats. The only gloves we had were work gloves, the cotton type with black rubber dots on the palm side. When we working in the slush or the rain or worst of all, freezing rain, the gloves were nearly worthless, useful only for keeping splinters and abrasions at bay. Most of the gloves had holes in the fingertips, but they were still better than nothing at all. I was lucky to have the same pair of thin leather gloves (I think they were for golfing or riding?) I'd neglected to wear for my journey out the 2nd floor window via a rope. Their smooth surface didn't collect snow and slush. They weren't very warm, but they were better than what Dad called the "dot gloves".

Grandma Amy sent us new clothes sometimes. We went absolutely wild over her care packages. Other than that, our main sources of clothing were hand me downs from other people and the Coolin landfill. We scoured the dump every time we got to go. Raphah and I were sorely disappointed when Dad wouldn't take us. If he did take us, we had to repay it by picking up 26 aluminum cans, which was his estimation of compensation for the gas.

Once we were there looking for anything good when a car drove up. The guy inside it opened a door, unloaded several cats, and sped off. Some of them tried to run after his vehicle. I couldn't believe anyone would do such a thing, and Eliyah seemed upset over it too. We caught two of the cats and I went calling another one, but it ran into the woods and I couldn't get it. The two we brought back were both long haired tabbies, a male and female, and the female, Colette, became mine. The other....I can't remember his name so I'll call him Romeo, was more of a family cat. Colette was extremely affectionate and had bewitching green eyes. She had this habit of sashaying up to me, gazing up lovingly, and meowing with all the charm in the world right before digging her claws in and climbing up my leg. It was lucky that I wore the 3+ layers of clothing (which also was a good defense against toothpicks)! She'd ride on my shoulders once she'd ascended my body. I probably should have discouraged her, but really did not mind very much. I finally had a cat again.

Although Verna remained puzzled by what had become of the baby Mom was supposed to have (this was a recurring and embarrassing question put to us by other people, that we did not know how to answer), she contacted her niece about the kids in our family and our clothing situation. It seems that her niece had some sort of access to free clothing that was brand new and hadn't sold, or something like that. We were absolutely stunned when we received two huge freight boxes packed solidly with clothing for us. Nothing like this had ever happened to us before. We were used to picking through the landfill, and would have been delighted with a trip to a thrift store with a dollar or two for each child to spend. To receive this much nice, new clothing was truly surreal. It was so surreal that Yahweh quickly informed us that he would help us decide who got what. It took us days to go through all that clothing. The funny thing of it was, there was almost no clothing at all for Dad. Yahweh said that this was some sort of an indication of Dad's devotion, or lack of it, and our persistence in hoping and praying for clothing. Even now, this strikes me as terribly funny and accurate.

Even in "normal" times, life was tenuous at our house. We regularly ran out of necessary items, such as water, or key food ingredients, or firewood. I'd copied a lot of recipes from the Great Depression cookbook (from the library) which included creative substitutions for things we ran out of a lot. For whatever reason (poor planning comes to mind) we were constantly living on the edge, especially now that the job at the marina was finished and Dad hadn't been paid for the balance of the work (according to him- I have no idea what actually happened). Even in an average winter, that cabin was cold. You could look between the logs to see who had pulled up in the driveway, and the wind whistled right through the house. We consumed a huge box of mill ends every day just to keep the house tolerably warm.

So we were sitting ducks when the winter storm from hell, the worst I have ever seen, hit us. We didn't usually listen to the radio, so we had no warning when it struck and we were woefully unprepared. The temperature dropped to at least -35 degrees F, and there were 40 mph winds. Raphah and I consulted the wind chill graph on our Forest Service map. It didn't go down that far. The nearest figure we could find put the wind chill factor at 80 below. Everyone moved out of their bedrooms and clustered their beds in the living room, sealing off the bedroom doors to consolidate what heat we had. We spent all day long huddled right next to the stove. The water in the barrels froze, so we moved one of them close to the stove. For once, the pot didn't smell at all- because it was frozen.

At night, some of the kids, including Sarah, slept with Mom and Dad. I got sick and tired of being cold. Even with two pairs of long johns, 2 pairs of socks and a sweat suit, I was still cold at night. So I slid one sleeping bag into another to make it double, laid several blankets on top of my mattress, then the sleeping bags, and more blankets, and tucked all the blankets in tightly. Dad said that I was a dirty pig to sleep like that without sheets; I didn't care. I was warm and they were still whining. We turned the radio on now, and heard that in Priest River, they were using one of the schools as an emergency shelter. I said I thought we should go to it. Dennis sneered at me and said we didn't need help, we would survive. Stuff like that was for city people, not us.

The storm raged on, knocking trees over like toothpicks. The truck was so cold it wouldn't start. We had no idea if the roads would have been passable even if the truck would start. And in the middle of all this, we ran out of firewood. It was the worst possible thing we could have run out of. It it hadn't been for the tree that had been blown down onto the Airstream trailer right next to our house, we might not have made it. We couldn't have driven anywhere and we had no phone. As it was, we still had the problem of getting the tree cut and split and brought into the house. It was a fairly tall, small diameter tree, the type that has minimal limbs for most of its length, which was good; it wouldn't need to be limbed or split much.

We all (except for Mom) bundled up as warmly as we could. I put on layer after layer of clothing and my Polaris snowmobile coat, and then we stepped out the door. The wind almost blew us over and cut right through our multi-layered clothes as though we were naked. Staying upright took a lot of effort. Walking took even more. This was cold as we had never experienced it before. Snow was blowing all over the place, making visibility difficult. Eliyah started cutting the tree into rounds, and we struggled to carry the logs to the house. It was hard to see where we were going, and it was mind numbingly cold. Our gloves were frozen in no time, and the house seemed like an oasis of warmth. Mom was thankful for the first log or two we brought in. After that, she got mad at us when we came in to warm up for a minute, or to trade out our gloves for warm ones, saying that we were making the house cold every time we opened up the door. Every trip to and from the tree to the house seemed like an incredible effort, and the longer we were out there, the harder it became. We had moved a lot of it when I went in to change out my gloves and thaw out. It seemed that even a few seconds of warmth would help. Mom screamed at me and told me I was making the house cold, to get out. Rachel was inside by now, helping to make cookies, but I was not welcome in there, and no, I couldn't have a cookie. She wouldn't let me change my gloves out, either. I stumbled back outside, infuriated with her keeping warm from our labor and not even allowing us to get warm or have dry gloves. Barely able to keep my footing against the wind, hauling the wood back and forth began to seem like some kind of a surreal nightmare. And I was so sleepy, so tired. Stumbling back from the house, I saw a patch of soft snow. It looked so inviting. Yes. I would just lay down for a few minutes and rest. I curled up into the snow as the anger melted away. I wasn't even cold anymore. I was warm, contented, and I drifted off. Sarah came by and bothered me, told me the work was done. I didn't care. She told me to come into the house. I told her I was fine, Mom told me not to come inside, and the snow was warm, I was OK. Luckily, she didn't leave me there. She probably thought I was crazy to try to go to sleep in the snow, but she was used to her sister doing weird things. She kept at me until she got me into the house.

I thawed out. My skin was red and and so itchy; no, the muscle itself itched horribly. We made it through that storm, but my respect and trust in my mother never quite recovered..

After the storm, Mom and Dad's bed stayed in the living room where they'd moved it to be closer to the stove. Raphah and Sarah moved in to the cedar bedroom. It was still too cold for anyone to inhabit the other bedroom, but eventually, Rachel and I moved into there, with me on the top bunk and Rachel on the lower one.

There was still snow, but spring was just around the corner and our spirits improved. I started planting garden seeds that we'd gotten from the food bank in pots. I had no experience in gardening; my only sources were Back to Basics and the wealth of Mother Earth News magazines we had. Consequently, I started seedlings that spring which I have never grown since in pots, such as soybeans and bush beans. When we ate grapefruits one evening, I noticed that one of the seeds had a root. I planted it, and soon there was a sturdy, slender green sprout thrusting its way into the world, full of hope. I was hooked. From then on I bugged everyone I knew for seeds and considered it some kind of plant murder to throw them away when they could be planted instead.

Also, I was drawing and painting again, having recovered from the incident at Priest Lake where Mom went through my sketchbook, telling me which drawings were demonic and had to be ripped out and burned. I had lost almost half my work, and she had an unpleasant habit of criticizing the rest of it, telling me how she thought it should be. I never understood why she didn't just make her own drawings. Now, however, she spent a lot more time talking to Yahweh, writing down prophecies and dream interpretations, and singing songs he had taught her. When she wasn't doing that, there were the basics of daily survival to attend to.

We began to acquire more animals. First Doug and Donna gave us a goat, our first doe (female goat). Della was a French Alpine, cou blanc (white shoulders, black hindquarters) in color. They said she had scoliosis, and she certainly looked that way. Her back was arched rather than being anywhere close to level, and her rear legs were thin and feeble. Her front end had become powerfully muscular to compensate her rear legs, but even so, she would often sway and collapse as she walked, because her legs would give out on her. She was a cull and should have been eaten, but we knew nothing about livestock, so she became a pet, Sarah's first goat of her own. Della was strong willed, bossy, obstinate and difficult in spite of her handicap. If you tried to lead her somewhere she'd rather not go, she'd pull you as hard as she could, or fall over and then try to wobble off without you. My low opinion of goats was not helped at all by knowing her, but Sarah adored Della and soothed her patiently every time she fell down, and waited for her to get up again.

We looked in the Nickel's Worth, the local free advertising paper, every week for free horses, free llamas, and other animals, even dogs. Dad was pretty adamant about not getting any more dogs or cats. One day we saw a free goat advertised, and Raphah had Dad call about it. To our surprise, the goat was still available, and before we knew it, Dad and Mom were unloading her from the truck! Penny was coppery-brown colored, a Nubian with long, pendulous ears like a hound dog. She was adorable! I'd had no idea that goats could actually be attractive, but this one was; I was actually jealous of this goat. The grass was beginning to emerge now, and every day Sarah and Raphah tied the goats out in the pasture.

Goats were OK, but I still wanted a horse. Or maybe a sheep. Baby lambs were so cute! I looked every week, but there were never any free lambs. There weren't even any for the price of the money Dad had "borrowed" from me, $25. I read every article and book I could find about sheep, and went back and read the Herriot books again. Yes, sheep were definitely what I wanted. I reserached the different breeds....pretty soon, sheep and gardening were more or less the only things I ever talked about.

After weeks of hearing me chatter non-stop about sheep, Eliyah got a bright idea: he called up our old friends Bonnie and Lowell in Naples, who raised sheep. Sure enough, they had a small ewe lamb that had been rejected by its own mother and was getting along in life by nursing other ewes when she could get away with it before she was butted away. It was a Corriedale Polypay cross. Corriedales were a breed I'd been interested in; I hadn't heard of Polypays before. At any rate, she was free, it was a ewe, and she was going to be mine! I was ecstatic. We drove up to Naples and got the lamb. I asked Lowell every conceivable question I could think of, including what sort of pen to build for her. Dad asked if we could tie her out- Lowell looked shocked and said she was much too young and small for that yet. I held Lamby in my lap as we drove home. She was so tiny, about the size of a cat. Her body was covered in tight white ringlets. I ran my hand lovingly over her wrinkled body and parted the tightly curled wool, and was appalled to discover that she was absolutely covered with ticks! There weren't just a few of them, there were probably hundreds. I started picking them off of her, but it was clearly a task that would take hours to complete.

Strangely enough, we hadn't thought of what to feed her or how to feed her until we got home. All we had was cow milk from the store and I didn't realize it then, but store milk will give lambs scours, especially if you don't know what you're doing. We didn't have a bottle, either, only a turkey baster. Dad told me she would have to learn to drink from a bowl, but despite my best efforts, she did not. I knew that the milk should be warmed for her, having read that cold milk causes scours. I wasn't very experienced with our Coleman camp stove and kept scalding the milk. I tried sucking the milk up into a turkey baster and feeding it to her that way. As soon as she felt the hard plastic tip of the baster in her mouth, she'd turn her head away abruptly and despondently. I wished we had a bottle, any kind of bottle, like the one we'd used for Cisco. Mom and Dad both said that when she got hungry enough, she'd eat, but it certainly didn't seem that way.

I struggled to get her to eat for the next several days. Mom said that I was neglecting her, because she needed to be fed every three hours, even at night, just like a human baby. The thing of it was, I could hardly get her to eat at all. Donna, who had a lot of experience with goat kids, came over and tried to help me. She held Lamby expertly and got a little bit of the milk into her mouth, but quickly informed us that the turkey baster just was not going to work. We needed the kind of black rubber nipple that fits over a glass pop bottle. They only cost .35 to .50, but Dad wouldn't buy one. He said she just wasn't hungry enough yet. Donna also mentioned that if we got a goat, maybe Lamby would nurse from the goat. If not, the goat milk would be better for her. Already she had developed the typical foul smelling yellow diarrhea that characterizes scours. Lamby's personality had gone downhill, too. She seemed lackluster and spiritless. Desperate, I went through the Nickel's Worth paper again, this time for dairy goats, because neither Della nor Penny were in milk. I found a Toggenburg doe with triplet doelings for $75. This was a fantastic deal, but Dad thought it was too much money, so we didn't get her.

Meanwhile, they didn't want her in the house during the day, and increasingly, not at night, either. I couldn't put her in with Della and Penny. Penny might be OK, but Della butted everything in sight- cats, dogs, it didn't matter. I knew that Lamby would not be safe with her. So I took the two large tractor tires in the pasture which we played with and laid them one atop the other, like two stacked doughnuts, lined it with straw, and set Lamby in there. At night I covered it with a sheet of plywood in case it rained, and to keep her safe. She didn't seem to mind being in there. I checked on her frequently during the day, picked ticks off of her. She didn't resist, just laid passively on her side. I didn't know what a bad sign this was...I thought she was just tame. When she was out of the tires, Dad made me tie her out like the goats. She didn't have enough energy to run around anyway, but insisted that maybe what my newborn lamb needed was to eat some grass.

She deteriorated pretty quickly, and I became more and more upset with the way things were turning out. I spent hours trying to get her to eat, but she wouldn't even hold her head up anymore, and everything I did get into her came right out again as yellow scoury diarrhea. Mom became angry and one day, as I sat there with tears runnign down my face, begging Lamby to eat, she said harshly, "I wish Lamby would just die so that Rebekah would spend more time doing her chores! All she thinks about is Lamby." Not much time passed before Mom got her wish. Lamby began having seizures. By the next day, she was gone. I was heartbroken, and I couldn't believe that Mom had wished for my beloved little lamb, that had never hurt anything, to die.

The spring was horribly muddy, mud as we'd never experienced before. I didn't care, though. I could finally run around in the pasture with sneakers instead of my heavy hiking boots, and with only a single pair of jeans. It felt so light to be freed of all that, and even the bare earth and pebbles looked beautiful to me. I pranced around happily, kicking the patches of snow that hadn't melted yet into bits. The nights were still cold, but at last, we could get out of the house.

Someone gave us some chickens, and we put them in some rabbit cages at first. It was funny, because when Sonny saw them, he ran right up to the cage and stood frozen, pointing at them, as perfect as any photograph of a working bird dog. We had found out that he was afraid of loud noises and gunshots in particular.

Most of my spare time was spent in the first garden I'd ever had. I dug the ground for it myself, used some split cedar rails we had laying around to make a fence around it. The entire garden was tiny, about the size of a small bathroom. I planted kohlrabi, peas, radishes, jersalem artichokes, beans, and others. We had no source of water, so I used the buckets of wash water that I had to empty everyday anyway. Raphah made a garden, too. He planted swiss chard and pumpkins. We insulted one another's gardens and bragged about our own, as we did with everything the other did, but secretly, I admired his garden. He was doing a really good job with the swiss chard. There was always a lot of rivalry between he and I, but behind it was a grudging respect, and the proof of this was that we were constantly trying to outdo one another.

Every seedling that came up was like a miracle. I spent a lot of time memorizing the appearance of the seedlings of each kind of plant. Some of them, like radishes and broccoli, looked a lot alike. I pulled out cards from magazines for free seed catalogs, and before long, I was spending hours reading them. What was even better was that companies I hadn't contacted seemed to find out somehow that I wanted gardening catalogs, and pretty soon I had a good sized stack of them! I began planning what kind of a farm I would have someday; what animals I'd have, what trees, and so on. Of course, everything on my farm would be done the old fashioned way, with horses instead of tractors. I wouldn't own a car or a truck or have electricity, but I would be better set up for living this way than our family was. I'd have a well with a hand pump. Or, I'd have the barrels set up on a platform outside the kitchen and bathroom, and have the hoses threaded through the walls and into the the sink so that I wouldn't have to bring the barrels indoors. I drew a lot of diagrams and lists and ideas. Everyone else laughed at me, but I just tuned them out.

I also spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of husband I wanted. After a lot of deliberation, I decided that he should be gentle, kind, patient, and have a good sense of humor. It would be nice if he were tall, because I didn't want my kids to be as short as I was. He should have blue eyes, and possibly blond hair. He should like animals, have similar interests, and would probably be Scandanavian. I prayed every day for Yahweh to send my husband to me soon, and to prepare me to be a good wife for him.

On a rare trip to Coolin, there was some kind of an event going on, so we stopped to see what it was. It was some sort of historical thing. I never found out what else was there, because my attention was immediately consumed by the very first thing I saw: an older woman making wool yarn with a spinning wheel. We've all seen spinning wheels in antique stores, as decor, but rarely ever in use. The thing was a whir of motion, in seeming contrast to the woman's calm demeanor and slowly moving hands. She held a handful of fluffy wool and streched out small portions of it, which turned magically into yarn and fed into the orifice of the machine, to be wrapped automatically onto a spool of yarn. It was hypnotic; I just stared and tried to make sense of what was going on, how the thing worked. She looked up at me with a kind smile,

"Go on, ask me questions! I can see the gears turning in your mind."

I didn't usually talk to outsiders, but she was so gentle and warm that I did. At the end of the conversation, my newfound friend had invited me to her cabin up in Nordman, to teach me how to spin wool, how to knit, how to play with fibers and art. She asked me to bring some of my art with me when I came.

Miriam Kopek and I became friends. She was my mentor, a positive, calm, accepting and supportive person in the life of a teen who was used to being ridiculed, shamed and abused. The hours in her home were deeply happy. She seemed to think I was clever and very creative, and she actually loaned me her own spinning wheel once she'd taught me how to use it, and gave me bags of wool, yarn, and fabric. She never thought less of me for the conditions we lived in, even though she sometimes drove to pick me up or to take me home. I felt as though I'd found a fairy godmother. She clucked approvingly over everything I made and said that I had talent. She loaned me her books. Her husband worked in some sort of business where he had access to trial sample of cold cereal, and they gave us a lot of samples. We of course, were absolutely delighted to have any cold cereal at all, and the trial samples were fun. They tended to be similar but different, and you never knew exactly what it would be until you opened up the plain box.

Spinning wool is a very calming, centering activity. Although it wasn't classified as work (in other words, I could only spin wool in my limited free time), it wasn't frowned upon, either, because it was productive and a good skill for a young woman to have in preparation for marriage, which was the only sort of future that was ever entertained for me. Spinning wool and going to Miriam Kopek's became a welcome refuge from the strange, otherworldly drama that was our family life.

We received word one day that Matt Christson's family had been forcibly taken from their land; it had been sold by the IRS because the Christsons didn't believe in paying taxes to Caesar. Don and Helen had been arrested, leaving Matt and Lee to fend for themselves at a local campground. They were both adults or nearly so, but the news left us shaken and sympathetic even though we didn't hang out with the Christsons much anymore. I wasn't sure why; it was something about the women not knowing their place in the family and them being respectful to Dad, who was a man. Everyone knew it was wrong for a woman to be disrespectful to a man. Still, we worried about the family.

We were busy struggling to survive ourselves, though. Once more out of work, Dad and Mom joined the Gleaners, a group that collected food from stores that would have been thrown away otherwise. Then Dad became active with the food bank, and was soon bring a lot more than our family needed home, and giving it to anyone we knew was hungry or could use more food. Some of it, like the cottage cheese, wouldn't keep very long. Mom tried draining it with cheesecloth and drying it in the bathroom to preserve it. This sort of grossed me out, what with the pot reeking day in and day out in the same air the cheese was hanging in. We had plenty of day old bread, and often the stale bread that was dry or beginning to mold went to the chickens, along with any food scraps.

It was my job to feed the chickens. They also got a coffee can full of corn every day. When I fed them the corn, I noticed that every once in a while, one of the corn kernels would be whole, not cracked. Occasionally, one of the whole kernels would be striped with red. Sometimes the kernel was almost all red. I found this interesting and exciting, because I liked unusual vegetables and especially unusually colored vegetables. Red corn would be pretty interesting, if I could breed for corn that had only red kernels! I began sifting through the corn before I fed it and saving out all the red kernels to plant next year. I had seen Hopi Blue flour corn in the Gurney's seed catalog, but never red corn. Maybe I would have something new on my hands!

I did the same thing with any vegetable or fruit that entered our house. I would hover around when they were being cut into and get the seeds, lay them out on paper towels or newspaper, and carefully label the paper. When the seeds were dry, I folded the paper up and saved it. I quickly found that citrus seeds pretty much had to be used fresh. They didn't grow well once they'd been dried. There was so much to learn about these things; I was frustrated at times by not being able to access more information.

My first radishes were ready, their red stems swelling just below the soil line into the characteristic radish shape that I'd waited for over a month to see. It was time to pick them, but the thought of pulling my beloved plants up out of the ground seemed wrong. Who was I to choose for a plant to die so I could eat it? It seemed so cruel! I almost cried as I pulled it out of the ground. At least with the pea plants, I wouldn't have to sacrifice the entire plant to eat it. The vegetable plants were beautiful, and I couldn't understand why none of the books or articles I'd read had ever mentioned this. Many of the seed catalogs didn't even show what the actual plant would look like, or how big it would be, only the vegetable itself, looking pretty much as it would in a grocery store. As far as I was concerned, my food plants were just as pretty as any silly, frivolous flower. I felt like they were really underrated in terms of aesthetics.