Dennis went back to California for a short time. Our financial situation was going downhill, and I think he had some kind of business to settle down there. He took some of the handmade wooden items that Don Christson made, presumably to sell them at a profit above what Don would make and then pay Don his asking price. It may be that we had left some of our belongings down there and he went to retrieve or sell some of them, I'm not sure. We children were frequently left in the dark about such th ings. Mom would simply tell us we didn't need to know.

At any rate, I don't remember missing him at all. We played a lot of games when we weren't running around outside. My favorite was Othello, which even Dennis couldn't beat me at, but noone would play me. I usually had to play it solitaire style. We taped little pieces of paper to some of the Othello pieces to designate them as chess pieces, and played chess with them (the board has the same number of squares). My mom hated chess because it was my dad's favorite game, and after awhile she decided it was evil, and I had to peel all the tape off the pieces. Mike had a Battleship game that we enjoyed. Monopoly invariably led to fights. There was another one that I would love to get my hands on today: Pathfinder. In this game, each party had a board shielded from the opponents view. The board was grooved to allow the placement of partitions to make a maze. You would make your mazes, and then try to work your way through the other person's maze blindfolded, so to speak. If you used the entirety of the board for one long, twisting maze with only one ending, then you only had as many turns as the board had spaces before your opponent won, unless you could get to the end of their maze before that. Generally it was best to provide a few traps or dead ends, but that limited the number of spaces for the true ending if they happened to find it. We loved to play Pathfinder. I loved mazes in general and drew a lot of them on paper. Often they'd be in the shape of animals, such as cats.

When Dennis came back, full of his usual pomposity and bravado and ego, he brought with him big boxes of very sour small oranges. They were nearly impossible to eat even if you enjoyed very sour things, which I did. Mom made them into orange marmalade and canned it. She was also making another garden. I steered clear of the garden, remembering how the one in Naples had turned out. I don't remember our harvetsing anything at all from it.

I was building a fort in the back yard with branches and plastic sheeting and soft grass and thistledown. I wanted to be able to hide in it or to sleep in it overnight, but so far it wasn't waterproof. Mike came out to me in tears. Toby was in his arms. He said that Dennis had revoked his promise to let him keep Toby and was saying that he'd have to give him away. I told him we could put him in my fort and hide him there. We tried, but Toby ran right out to us, wagging his tail happily. Desperate, Mike ran over to a further part of the yard and tried to make a little pen with logs. If we could get Toby to stay in there, we could pretend he'd run away or gotten lost somehow. Toby wouldn't stay in the pen. He kept climbing or slipping out and running over to Mike. He yelled at him that he had to stay in the pen even as his cheeks were wet with tears, but it was no use. Toby loved his owner and wouldn't stay in that pen. Mike sat down on the ground and sobbed with Toby in his arms. A few days later, Toby had been given away.