Early winter brought changes into our family, some small, some drastic and life-impacting.

Sheba came into heat. Dennis didn't want her to get pregnant, so he chained her and the rapidly aging Bruno just out of breeding range. Of course, I spent a lot of time around the animals, and so I knew that she would be having puppies anyway, by a bad tempered yellow dog whose tail curled up over his back. He was a mixed breed, probably part Chow or Akita , possibly part Husky. I didn't like him, and I chased him away when I could, but he inevitably got to her anyway. Bruno watched these affairs miserably. I knew that Bruno didn't have many years left. He could hardly walk anymore and dragged his hindquarters around behind him through the snow when his legs gave out. So I moved his chain, just barely, only a foot or two. It was enough. I hoped that maybe Sheba would have a few of his puppies, too, a legacy of the loving loyal St. Bernard.

Mom got sick; really, really sick. We never went to doctors, relying instead on prayer for divine healing. She had a thyroid disorder and had been taking meds for it in California, but had declared herself healed of it one day and threw them all out. The current illness was some sort of a cold. She said it was a mastoid infection. Whatever it was, it caused excruciating pain, hypersensitivty to sound, fever, and she was bedridden for a number of days. We tiptoed about the house whispering while she cried and begged us not to shout (our whispering sounded like shouting to her), trying to keep the household together, cooking dinner and taking care of ourselves. She took Sudafed, but it didn't help. One evening, she weakly called me into her bedroom. She wanted me to check the closet, because she thought she'd seen a demon in it. I didn't particularly want to see a demon, but I looked anyway, while she babbled incoherently alternating with fragments of prayer for protection from Satan's evil forces. I searched the room and found no demons. She said that perhaps it was the Sudafed. Maybe it was, or maybe it was a harbinger of things to come.

Eventually she recovered of course, and Christmas drew near. We weren't allowed to even think about Christmas. Instead we studied the pagan origins of the holiday and wrote letters to our family begging them to forsake this wicked practice. Of course, we didn't relish writing these letters, but Mom and Denis made us do it, they forced us to call our family in Illinois and tell them we didn't want any Christmas presents. They wrote terse little notes the entire time we were on the phone, telling us what to say even it was completely out of context with the flow of the conversation we were having. If we didn't comply, the notes would get emphatic, and then we would be cut off, the phone taken away, hung up, and we would be berated for hours on end in the aftermath. I hated it. I couldn't stand the anxiety, the pressure, the lies we were supposed to tell about attending school in Bonner's Ferry when we actually lived in Priest Lake and hadn't been to a single day of school. After a while, when the calle dme downstairs to talk on the phone, I simply curled up under a coffe table and refused to speak to anyone. Then Mom would point to me and say, "See, look how anxious she is talking to her father! She's terrified of him!". Letter writing was just as bad, and so it wasn't very long before I hardly wrote to my family at all. I couldn't endure the constant pressure to try to persuade them of this or that theological truth, or to ask for money from this relative, or to lie and pretend life was all happy-happy, good-good in northern Idaho and we were oh so glad to be there.

Christmas Eve came. We tried to conceal our disappointment. Lisa wept openly when she discovered that Denis had eaten her can of olives, her Thanksgiving present. He simply laughed at her and said she should have eaten them, but she said she was saving them. Mike and I had stashes of dried apples and prunes in our rooms, but we didn't tell anyone...it wasn't allowed to have private stores of food or money anymore, even a little bit, even a penny. We were trying hard to be happy when a knock came at the door. We went to it, but nobody was there. Upon opening it, we saw several presents left on the porch for us! There was a big white teddy bear with a red ribbon bow sitting on top. The girsl cried out happily and hugged it, bickering over which one of them would get it. I wanted to touch it.... I don't remember what the other present were. I think there may have been fruitcake or cookies or something edible and festive, but all I really remember is the bear. We wondered aloud over who could have left us the presents. We couldn't think of anyone except for the neighbors across the street, but they'd never paid us the slightest ntoice. I went upstairs, full of happiness and warmth. I gazed out the bedroom window at air patterns in the beam of the shop light for hours, trying to imagine who could have done this, and how nice it was of them.

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.