Life in the motel was growing old. We had been there for well over a month. Dennis relieved some of the boredom with a few of his "games", such as giving us all pudding in cups and offering to pay us a quarter if we could lick the entire cup clean. Well, the bottom of the cup was too deep to reach all the way into it, but we certainly tried, amid his ample chuckling and lewd comments about tongues in general. We learned a lot of yoyo tricks. We hiked with Kary and I played ball with him. We squabbled and bonded, aggravated by the small space and also prevented from being able to afford sustaining long term grudges in such close quarters. Tommmy John lit the entire field on fire on purpose (a springtime ritual in northern Idaho) and unwittingly set a storage shed on fire, in which was stored a valuable juke box. Kary tried to help put the fire out, but quit in disgust when he realized that Tommy was starting more fires as fast as they were extinguished. The jukebox and everything else in the shed went up in smoke.

These were diversions. We wanted out of the darned motel room. Dennis and my mom went out frequently looking for places, but there didn't seem to be any results to show for it. At any rate, they didn't tell us much of anything. We weren't sure. Much like the move from California, we usually wouldn't know what was going on until we were in the middle of it.

Suddenly, they had found a place. They drove us into Naples, and we turned left onto a country road. The road wound and turned, but was reasonably level in comparison to the road to the Weaver's...which is to say, we weren't headed towards the top of a mountain. In fact, we were on the same road we'd taken to meet Bonnie and Lowell, but we stopped before reaching their ranch. On the right side of the road was an old farmhouse, a huge classic red barn, and a smaller one story dairy barn. This was exciting! We were out and running around the place before Mom's pleas of caution could be heard. There was a tall, crumbling silo that looked like it'd be great to climb! There was a small, tight little shack with a funny, highly decorated cast iron parlor stove. This was the bunkhouse, where Kary would live. There were fields of grass (alfalfa, actually, but we didn't know it), forests on the edges of the place, a log cabin turned chicken coop, all sorts of neat stuff.

The house was the worst I'd lived in so far. There were only two bedrooms, for SIX people! How would we manage? Mom and Dennis got one of the bedrooms right off the bat, leaving the rest of us to cram into the double bunk bed, which had four bunks. There was room for the bed and very little else. The kitchen was spare, with a big roomy sink, and the bathroom was also spare and utilitarian. The living room was the worst: in just one room, I counted five different kinds of wall! Still, what I cared about was that now I had room to run, and maybe I could finally get a cat again. The family dog, Sheba, was newly pregnant by a big black chow at the Deep Creek motel. Now that we lived in the country, we would be real "Idahodians"! We would have animals and horses and gardens and we would hunt and shoot guns....yeah, we were real country people now...we thought.