The summer wore on, and I became somewhat feral, running in the woods, munching on the plants and berries that I knew were edible. I often spent the entire day away from the house and primarily alone. I crave solitude and quiet the way other people seem to thrive on social gatherings and noise- I need it to feel sane. The lake was always cold, but I waded and swam in it anyway. I loved exploring the woods and finding different flowers and plants and insects. I had aspirations to be a sort scientist (or perhaps a doctor, my dream since early childhood) and I collected the various plants and insects, pressing and drying them. I didn't know what most of them were and had no way to find out, I only knew that they were interesting to me.

I say that I had no way to find out, because we had no books on this subject, we never visited the library, and we didn't have any friends either. My mom, apparently having given up on the Mennonite workbooks, ordered a new curriculum that was supposed to be better, A.C.E. The A.C.E. format was, incredibly enough, even worse than the Mennonite books. The books were infused with religion (even the math books) on each and every page, and illustrated with cartoons of white and black students who were good Christians. The black characters were very stereotyped with fat lips- I considered the cartoons somewhat racist. The worst of it was that the workbooks were redundant in the extreme. The math problems at the end of the book would be the same type as the ones in the beginning, so that by the time you were finally through with the wretched thing, you were bored to tears! And all through it, on every page, the smiling fat lipped cartoons were festooning the pages with their ear to ear phony grins and their goody two shoes attitude. It was pretty disgusting, especially for a teenager who was supposed to be in high school. There were a few textbooks floating around the house that had belonged to Renee and Michelle when they were in school, one of which was a science/biology text. Science had always been a favorite subject, and I worked through the entirety of the science book by myself, sometimes staying up into the wee hours of the night writing out answers to the questions, fascinated by starfish and mollusks and physiology and environmental issues, even though no one would ever read the answers or check the work. Our reading material was limited, but we did have some Reader's Digest condensed books, and I devoured these as well.

Sheba was pregnant again, this time by a mongrel that lived at the edge of Kalispell Bay. I had trained Ricotte to ride on my shoulder and I spent hours with all of the cats outside. Dennis brought home two more cats. Coco was part Siamese, with blue eyes, white fur, and pale gray tabby points. Coco was neurotic. She was my mom's cat. She was used to being housed in a bathroom, and her favorite thing was to lie curled up in the sink, letting the water drip on her while she purred and slept contentedly. She was absolutely terrified of men, especially Dennis, and of men's boots. If you didn't want her to go upstairs or to enter a room, all you had to do was to set a pair of men's boots in the doorway. Coco wasn't very friendly to anyone, but my mom loved her, and unlike the other cats, she was allowed to live in the house. Katrina was black with long glossy hair and wicked feline eyes. She loved people, but had odd ways of showing it. For example, she would climb right up your leg and torso, digging claws in generously, in order to get you to hold her, or to perch on your shoulder. She was the only cat that would climb up and tree, turn around on the trunk, and climb back down headfirst like a squirrel. Something had happened to Sebastian, Lisa's cat, so Katrina became hers.

We made some friends. Here is how that came about. Once more, we had no food. My mom and Dennis were driving about aimlessly praying for Yahweh to do something about the food situation. They saw a driveway, and they had a feeling that they should turn into it, so they did. People came out of the house and said that the Lord had told them this would happen, and they had something for them: boxes of food! Now, I asked this family about this incident not long ago, and they snorted with derision and said that nothing of the kind occurred, so I have no idea what did happen that night. What I do know is that Mom and Dennis did come home with boxes of food, much of it dry goods, dehydrated foodstuffs, TVP, ice cream, lentils, etc. Most of it was very basic, but by this time, we were pretty happy for anything at all.

I'm not going to use the full actual names of the couple, in order to preserve their privacy. I'll call them Don and Helen Christson. Don and Helen had 3 children, 2 of whom still lived with them- a 16 year old son, Matt, and a daughter, Lee, who was older than Matt. Matt was tall, blond, blue eyed, and cute. Both men wore pinstriped overalls most of the time. Don was gritty and said what he thought whether you wanted to hear it or not. Helen was built like a mother hen and had a will of iron- definitely not the prototype of a wilting submissive wife. Once we actually heard her call Don an old fart and were appalled! She seemed to wear the pants in the family, and this made us uncomfortable. This family was what we called Constitutionalists. They studied the the United States Constitution, refused to use a driver's license or to pay taxes or to submit to the government in any way, because it wasn't following the constitution. There was always a lot of interesting political talk when they were around, much of which was pretty confusing. They supported themselves through a woodshop, producing handmade wooden items (Don/Matt), housekeeping (Helen), and producing various craft items and baked goods such as huckleberry pies (Lee). Our beliefs were already beyond the pale, but they were about to get stranger.

For starters, we had now switched over completely to using the Hebrew names Yahweh, instead of Lord, Elohim instead of God, and Yahshua instead of Jesus. We believed that using the standard Christian terminology was idolatry, and that people who didn't know "the true names" would go to hell even if they were devout believers otherwise. We listened almost exclusively to Messianic Jewish music. We were allowed (grudgingly) to listen to standard Christian music, but only if we sang over the "pagan, idolatrous names". This was really a pain if the music had a lot of "praise Jesus" refrains, and it took all the fun out of listening to the music. We had to write letters to our family members warning them that they were worshiping with the wrong names and would go to hell for worshiping the wrong gods, however inadvertently.

We no longer ended prayers with the word "Amen", using instead, "halleluyah".

We kept a 7th day Sabbath instead of worshiping on Sunday. On Sabbath, we weren't allowed to read anything that wasn't spiritual, to do any sort of work, or to play, or to go for walks. I couldn't draw, we couldn't buy something even if we needed it, we couldn't handle money at all, we weren't even supposed to think about anything that wasn't spiritual. I wasn't supposed to play with or touch the cats, but of course, I did anyway.

When we set the table, we set an extra place setting and used a special chair. This was Yahshua's chair. Of course, no food was put on the plate, but Dennis said that Yahshua's presence was there, in the chair, and that the chair was there to remind us to talk only of wholesome things at the dinner table in Yahshua's presence, since he was our (albeit invisible) dinner guest. Before we ate, we had to say the blessing for the meal. This entailed everyone saying their own prayer, one by one, around the table. More than once, I had come in fresh from the woods, elated, and could think of nothing else to say than to thank Yahweh for trees (to climb) or legs (to run with). Usually we tried to make our prayers fancy and elaborate and to think of things that Dennis couldn't find fault with. Sometimes the food would be lukewarm by the time the prayers were finally through with. He always prayed for Renee and Michelle to be delivered out of Egypt (California).

We no longer celebrated any holidays except for Thanksgiving. We didn't calls the days "Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc", because these names hark back to days of pagan idolatry. Instead, we had to call the days "first day, second day, third day, fourth day, etc". This small detail made it almost impossible to communicate with other people regarding the passage of time.

Luck was evil, too. Dennis said it was a nickname for Lucifer. If someone said "good luck" to us, we couldn't say much back except to smile uneasily. There were scads of words that were no longer allowed in our speech, and the reasoning for some of them, such as "wonderful" baffles me to this day.

We were encouraged to ask Yahweh to speak to us, to listen closely to see if he said anything, and to tell our parents of any meaningful dreams we had. This would have drastic repercussions......