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 typically 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.