As I said before, we were rarely allowed to leave the house (or in my case, any farther than I could walk within an hour, although they were becoming more begrudging about my walks ever since Michelle had pointed out to them that I was gone most of the time and no one was entirely sure where), but there were exceptions. Nearly all of the exceptions involved work or tasks which our parents didn't want to do.

Puppies and kittens: When we had a litter that had to be disposed of, Denis would drive us to a store, either the local Tamrak, which was a combination restaurant, convenience store, laundromat, gas station, and general store, or the IGA in Priest River. This store was intimidating to me because it was so big, and I didn't know anyone at all there. Also, even though a family member (never me, thank goodness!) usually asked the store's owner's permission first, I was terrified that an owner or store employee would come out and ask us what we thought we were doing there in front of their store with a cardboard box crammed full of puppies, accosting the customers who tried to hurry past us before their spouse or child begged for a pet. My mom's record of Sheba's ancestry seemed to change with each litter she bore, and so did our writing on the box. One year it said they were half Border Collie, half Chow, that was simple enough. Next year she said that Sheba actually wasn't full Border Collie, she was part German Shepherd and part Labrador, too. We had no idea what the sire was, part Dingo, maybe? Husky? We weren't sure. The sign listed an impossible formula: 1/4 Border Collie, 1/3 German Shepherd, 1/4 Lab, 1/2 Husky, or something like that. It never really occurred to us to spay Sheba or the female cats, so we had to go through the finding homes for puppies at least twice a year, more often if there were kittens too.

Laundry: Since we didn't have a washer or dryer, we went to the laundromat. The trip to the laundromat seemed to drag on forever; the hot, feverish air, the din of the machines, Mom's constant griping for help. The truth of the matter is that I had no idea how to wash laundry. My dad had always done it and then we folded it, mostly items such as towels and blankets: square or rectangular things that were easy. I didn't know how to sort laundry, or measure out soap, or how to work the dials, or what kind of clothes got hot water or cold. Mom got mad if we didn't do more than folding, and even if we did, she got mad, because she said that I folded things wrong, that I folded towels and shirts my dad's way. I couldn't see that it really mattered as long as they were folded neatly, but she didn't like anything at all to remind her of him. Still, we looked forward to going to the Tamrak to do the laundry and begged her to take us. It was virtually the only time we got out of the house and got to go to the store and get a treat- a soda, or maybe even a candy bar. Times were tight, but I quickly realized that there was an awful lot of money under the machines, and so I unwrapped a wire coat hanger and fished all the quarters and lint out from under the machines. We got enough money to get candy and sodas for us all. That embarrassed Mom, she didn't want people to see us and think we were poor, but like most kids, the allure of the money won out over her disapproval.

Mom didn't want to take me a lot of the time. She preferred taking the others. She said that I didn't work hard enough, that I always embarrassed her, that I wasn't dressed to go to town, that there wasn't room. Then one day when she had taken me with her, I got terribly ill somehow. It was common for me to get migraines, she got them too, but this was something worse. My belly was gripped by such severe stomach cramps that I could hardly move. I curled up on one of the hard wooden benches and just moaned and wept. The pain was intense. Mom thought I was faking, but I seriously could hardly move a muscle without the cramps intensifying. Time seemed to stretch out indefinitely, all I wanted was to be pain-free again. I lay there thinking of all the times when I had happily skipped along, trotting carefree through the woods, giving no thought at all to how lucky I was not to feel any pain. Ohhhh...I would never again take that for granted, I thought. What a fool I had been! She yelled at me, complained that she needed me to fold clothes. I tried to tell her that I was really sick, that I needed to go to a doctor. She just got mad. I imagined vain fantasies wherein Don and Helen would come by and I would beg them to help me. Of course this was silly, no such thing happened. I somehow got transported to the car and rode home, still in pain, went to bed and stayed there quite willingly for the rest of the day. Looking back, I have no idea what could have caused such symptoms; food poisoning perhaps? I really don't know, except that it was quite real and extremely painful. After that, Mom wouldn't take me to the laundromat unless there was no other choice: "Well, I don't know if I want to take you, are you going to get sick again like you did last time, just when it's time to work?", just as though I had gotten sick on purpose.

Firewood: The weather was getting cooler at night and our small lot had no real firewood to offer as sacrifice for the wood burning stove that heated the home. We had to look elsewhere. Elsewhere turned out to be the lumber mills in Priest River. When lumber is milled, it gets cut and finished into its dimensions: 2"x4" or 2"x6" or whatever the size will be, and then it gets cut to length: a multiple of 2 beginning with 6' as the shortest available length. The ends that get trimmed off when the lumber is cut to length are called mill ends. At that time, they were free for whoever wanted to go to the work of shoveling them into their truck. Mike and I loaded many a truckload of mill ends. Once we got them home, we had to stack them neatly on the deck of the porch. I liked to stack them and build cubbies in the stack for the cats to nest away in. I used the longest 2x6 ends for the roofs.

Apples and other fruit: If Dennis could find a fruit tree with ripe fruit on it, he usually could persuade the tree's owners to let us pick it all. Steve and Verna had 3 or 4 apple trees that we picked. I loved picking apples, climbing the trees. The apples were always so crispy and good fresh off the tree. We got boxes from the grocery store and filled box after box with fruit. Once home, we kept them in the garage or mom would make pink applesauce by cooking the fruit with the peels, giving it a reddish tint and an especially good flavor. She was such a wonderful cook. Then we got European prune plums, and she dried those into prunes, pitting them first. They were much harder and better tasting than the store bought prunes.

Dennis often went off on day long business trips to scout out opportunities for salesmen (what he was best at) or other work which usually did not pan out. If there was physical labor involved at all, he took Mike or I or both of us. If there was not, he went alone or took Lisa.

After Renee and Michelle went back to California, we got our bedrooms back, except that Lisa and I switched rooms. I wasn't severely depressed as I had been when we moved into the house, so I began to furnish my room this time and to unpack some of the things that had been boxed up. I had an actual mattress now and I set it up on old milk crates for a bed. I hung my clothing (much of it was now unsuitable for the area in which we lived and to avoid Dennis' rude remarks) in the closet, including a thick, warm ice-pink jacket I never wore anymore. I hadn't wanted pink...I always wanted everything I owned to be blue- but had been coaxed into choosing this very pale, feminine color. Predictably enough, it didn't stand up well to my romps in the woods and then Dennis yelled at me every time he saw it, said that I was a nigger and I had niggered the jacket up, that I didn't deserve to ever get another coat, I could wear the one I wrecked. It wasn't actually wrecked, it's just that pale pink stains pretty easily. Oh well...I hung the albatross in the very back of the closet where I wouldn't have to look at it. There wasn't quite room for all the clothing. Mom said I needed a dresser, but of course we couldn't buy one. Instead, we arranged all the boxes and taped them together into a unit of cubbies. She cooked up some flour paste and told me how to paper mache them togther with the paste and strips of newspaper. I covered the entire makeshift dresser, had some paste left over, made a pot or two, a small sculpture of a sleeping cat. These things all took a while to dry. Once it was hard to the touch, we painted it white and it was officially done. A white dresser, how boring. The only paints in the house were mom's oil paints (strictly off limits!) and some acrylic crafts paints for her tole painting. The acrylic paints were all in dull dusty tones, no pure or clear hues among them. So using a damp paintbrush, I lifted the pigment from pastel sticks and applied this to the dresser. The colors were bright and cheerful. I adorned it all over with bright flowers. Now I had a dresser to store the clothing in.

I also had some kind of a bookcase or desk, I think...perhaps it was only the sheet of plywood I'd had in the other room. At any rate, I unpacked my microscope and set it up there. Mom gave me a houseplant, a nondescript vining type. From time to time I found seeds...a date pit, a bit of birdseed, spices, and planted them in the pot with the houseplant. The bird seed came up right away and made the whole more lush. I must have had a chair, because I often sat at the desk gazing into the microscope and trying to draw what I saw there. I went through the usual array of specimens; salt, sugar, pepper, a strand of hair, thread, a needle. Then I got a few dead insects, and those kept me happy for quite a while. I didn't know that a fly's wings had hair on them! Life was full of surprises when viewed closely. I stayed up late into the night, thrilled with each new discovery. I still spent most of the day away from the house or outside.

There wasn't much to read, or so it seemed. I read through a number of Reader's Digest condensed books. Mom occasionally took us to the library, where they had more condensed books for sale for a quarter each. We rarely ever borrowed the library's books...in fact we hardly visited the library at all, so I chose carefully when we did, trying to make sure I wasn't buying one that I already had read. I read about the Stepford wives, stepped into Dick Francis' world of horse racing intrigues, mysteries with glamorous women and jewels and handsome men who turned out to be rotten, James Herriot. One of my favorites was Peter Jenkin's Walk Across America. I admired him very much for having the strength and grit to travel so far on foot, for being able to survive. I read that book several times. Eventually I got my hands on the entire version and read it too. We had an old set of children's encyclopedias given to us by Don and Helen. Looking back, these were far from complete and much of the information was watered down or kept to a minimum, but they were still a goldmine compared to what we had had before them- nothing. Dennis saw me reading the condensed books one day and got disgusted. He said I'd never learn anythign worthwhile from them, the world was about to fall apart and I ought to read something useful. He directed me to a stack of boring old magazines: Mother Earth News. I flipped through them. Gardening (had enough of that already! I thought), plans for producing your own power (over my head), sprouts (Mom already made those), making weird food like tofu (ewww!) and tempeh, which was made from soybeans that got so moldy they formed a solid cake of mold and beans (YUCK!). Then I saw the article about the couple who lived on the backs of mules, without a home. The woman had given birth in a cave soemwhere and there was a picture of a little kid rding with them. They seemed really happy, and I found the entire story fascinating. There were articles about camping and eating wild foods and surviving and wilderness schools and how to get by with nothing at all except for your wits and maybe a pocket knife or a hatchet. I took up the stack of TMEN mags and devoured everything in them that interested me, skipping the gardening and hippie articles. There were even directions for making toy guns out of spring type clothespins that would shoot segments of other clothespins. Mike and I made several (ignoring Mom's questions about where her clothespins were vanishing to) and had a blast with them. Ah yes...life was fairly good, all in all.

When I wasn't out walking the trails (both human and deer), skipping stones on the lake, or playing with the dogs and cats, I typically holed up in my room. There I would draw, make diagrams of ideas and thoughts I had, or make things. Some of the things I made:

Various stuffed animals and dolls, including a horse with jointed legs and a turtle that could extend or retract its limbs and head within its shell or be taken entirely out of the shell. That was probably my best design, but I made scads of stuffed animals.

A crossbow. I don't think it could actually have killed anything larger than a grouse. I made it with bits of scrap lumber and a springy branch for the bow. The bow was the hard part, because the darts needed to be able to exit the channel they rode in, so the branch couldn't obstruct their path in any way. We also had a longbow, and I braided a thin, very strong bowstring for it.

Rock carvings. I would take a small flat stone and etch into it with a nail until a grooved pattern was deeply incised into the stone. It took days. After the pattern was done, I'd drill a hole into it, again with a nail, to make a necklace.

A simple loom, made of a cardboard box. On it, I made thin woven bookmarks, belts, and other narrow items. I loved weaving. Then I branched out into three dimensional weaving and made a little conical hat.

A pack for the dogs to wear when I went hiking. Poor old Bruno couldn't wear it, though. He could hardly suuport the weight of his own body without falling down every few yards, but he still insisted on coming along.

A frankly awful mobile of woodscraps left over from Don's woodshop, and an equally bad sculpture to match.

I spent a lot of time trying to develop and troubleshoot ideas for more creations. Sometimes the drawings and diagrams were more for the sake of working out a thought than actually implementing it, if that makes sense. Nobody in the family seemed to understand this. They would dash into my room, snatch a piece of paper or a notebook, and run and show the others what absurd things I was trying to make now, and then they would all hoot with ridicule and derision. They'd give it to Dennis and he'd pick it apart in depth, telling me I was wasting my time, why couldn't I come up with something more useful? And all the time, my siblings would laugh and say how stupid and ridiculous I was. I never told Dennis I was trying to come up with a design for pants and shoes that were extremely sturdy, that even I couldn't "nigger up". Thank goodness he didn't get his hands on that paper. I'd have had an hour long lecture about not groveling about in the dirt, about being ladylike like my sister Lisa.

None of them, including Dennis, could break my code. They tried and tried, tried to find the key (which was visual since the code had originated from a type of sign language) but, no success. This meant I could write pretty much whatever I wanted to with impunity and no one could ever read it. Obviously that couldn't be allowed. Mom asked Lisa to inquire of Yahweh about my code. The answer? "Behold, I am Yahweh thy Elohim. The code which thou askest about, the demons didst teach it to Jenny and it beith evil, an abomination to me." That was the end of that. They took every scrap of paper with even the smallest writing in code and burned it, chastising me all the while for bringing evil into the home and providing a means of communication for the demons. Dennis decided that there would be no more codes of any kind, or clubs, or forts. It seemed to me that they sought to deprive our existence of anything that coudl be even faintly pleasant or enjoyable.

The lake was now cold enough that I didn't peel off my shoes and socks and roll up my jeans to go wading in the water anymore. At home, there was a lot of emphasis on saving food up for the winter. Mom was drying prunes, and she was happy when we picked rosehips and wild strawberry leaves for tea. She also wanted us to pick wild blackberry, raspberry, and huckleberry leaves for tea, saying that it would give the tea the flavor of the plant's berries. We tried it, but the tea tasted nothing at all like the berries. We wondered why our herb teas didn't taste just like Celestial Seasoning's.

We went several times to the lumber mills to gather up mill ends for the woodstove. These days, Dennis ordered us to stack them in the back of the truck, even the very short ones, so as to maximize the amount of wood gained for the cost of hauling it. Usually Mike stacked it and I pitched it into the truck from the pile where the machinery dropped it. Once home we had to restack it all over again on the porch. It seemed unnecessary to us, but Dennis still wasn't working, unless you count the meager sales of the Gas Alerts, devices similar to fire alarms but which detected dangerous gases such as propane, butane, etc. Then for a while he brought home parts to rebuild or make starters and alternators and set the whole family up as an assembly line working on them. The idea was to sell these to someone, but I don't know if we ever did. From time to time money would get so short that we couldn't even afford to buy toilet paper. Dennis had some thin paper, the type that come in triplicate, some sort of forms. If you crumpled it repeatedly, got it wet, and hung it to dry over the shower rod, it was almost soft enough to resemble harsh toilet paper. It was certainly better than nothing at all. When we did get toilet paper, we children would pull off a small length, enough to last us if we ran out, and hide it somewhere. We seemed to run out really fast, and eventually we realized that Lisa was hiding an entire roll of each package we got. She heartily disliked having to use the colored paper. We ran short of our food and the dogs ran out of dog food, but Dennis had brought home two 50# bags of lentils. Mom cooked lentil soup for dinner several times a week, and for the dogs, the same thing, lentils. She sprouted the lentils, too. We ate lentils until we were sick and tired of them, and then we ate some more. The lentil monotony was broken only by the boxes from the food bank. These boxes never had stuff such as toilet paper, dish soap, laundry soap, feminine supplies, or toothpaste. They usually had a couple of ziploc baggies with dried milk powder, several boxes of macaroni and cheese, a few cans of vegetables, baggies of pasta, dried beans, and if we were lucky, a can or two of chili or canned pumpkin or soup. The canned soups were usally made into a sauce for the pasta. There was no butter or margarine to make the macaroni and cheese with. Sometimes there would be a box of hamburger helper, but no meat to make it with, either. We relied more and more on the dry goods that Arthur and Caroline had given us. Don and Helen gave us a few large cans of TVP. We didn't know what it was, but Helen explained it all to us. TVP stood for Textured Vegetable Protein. You could use it in place of meat for recipes, or in soups. It didn't taste very much like meat at all, but it was food, and that was what mattered to us now. Our fussy ways were beginning to fall by the wayside.

With the onset of cold weather came the biblical feast days. We had never observed these before, so they were especially exciting to us. We studied the bible a lot, as well as our Master Key magazines, to try and figure out what we were supposed to do.

First came the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). On Yom Kippur, you are not supposed to eat or drink for 24 hours (from sunset to sunset) or to wear leather, or to work at all. You spend the entire day mourning for your sins over the past year and pleading with God/Yahweh to give both you and the world another chance, another year to do a better job of it. We didn't know about the leather, or not to drink water. We did fast for a whole day and prayed and studied all day long. If I remember correctly, we didn't sleep, either. We stayed up all night long praying until the sky began to lighten and the sun arose.

Afterwards, we had a short time to prepare for the next holy day/week, the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot). Now, modern day Jews do not stay outdoors for 8 days, not entering their homes, but this is what we thought we had to do. So, we put a lot of effort into setting up our tent in the back yard. The weather was already quite cold at night, and so Dennis set up a fire pit lined with stones, most of them brick to head size. The idea was that at night, we would bring the stone into the tent with us. All our food would have to be prepared outdoors too, so we prepared for all that as well. Dennis and my mom didn't want to rough it, and they hauled their mattress off their bed and into the tent. The goal was to not sleep, eat, or live in the hosue at all, although we would still have to use the bathroom facilities. Any forays into the house were to be as brief as possible.

This proved to be rather difficult. For one, the mattress took up nearly all the space there was in the tent. Lisa was allowed to sleep with Mom and Dennis. The rest of us shivered against the cold ground. The stones lost their heat within a few hours and then tormented us with their frigidity in our sleeping bags. `We had a lot of blankets, but cramped betwen the mattress and the sidewall of the tent, it didn't seem to matter. We hardly slept at all, we were so cold. Still, this was supposed to be a joyous holiday, so we tried not to complain. The second night, we tried to be more prepared. Forgoing pajamas, we wore long johns and clothing over the long johns, and as many socks as we could layer over one another. We piled blankets under ourselves and added more to the top layer as well. Lisa and Mom complained as vocally as anyone about the cold, and this was especially irritating, since the rest of us didn't have the bulk of a matress beneath of, nor the warmth of one another next to us. I was crammed in between the foot of the bed and the sidewall of the tent, and Mike and Gia laid alongside the mattress towards the door of the tent. The second night was just as cold and damp. In the morning, Mom declared that Israel was a warmer clime, and surely Yahweh wouldn't want us to suffer like this, and she and the girls went indoors for good. Dennis grumbled and ranted and raved about being steadfast in adversity, and he and I and Mike all stayed in the tent for the third night. Again it was cold, and there was an open rift between Dennis, who proclaimed that Mom and the girls were sinning and breaking the commandments about a high holy feast day, and Mom, who pled with us to come indoors (Mike and I tried to persuade her that we were tough and we loved camping, really we did). Dennis said that Yahweh would judge people who didn't keep his feasts. Finally Mom ordered us into the house, but Dennis stayed outdoors the entire eight days. We never camped out for the Feast of Tabernacles again.

Opposition was starting to develop concerning my walks, if one could justifiably call them such. The reality of it is that I was gone for at least half the daylight hours and frequently more, starting homeward only when the sun sank past the horizon. I had no fear of the dark, but Mom was frequently frantic by the time I returned, which I couldn't understand. She'd fuss and fret about bears and cougars and coyotes attacking me while I'd sit there rolling my eyes at the melodrama. I never saw any cougars or coyotes, and my sole encounter with a bear was one in which a black bear and I happened to stumble across one another, and both ran as quickly as we could away from one another. I loved the outdoors, and the more time I spent there, the less appeal our habitation had for me. Dennis thundered and glowered and told horror stories of "white slavers" who would catch me and send me to Saudi Arabia, a prospect that seemed even more dubious than Mom's hysterics about wild animals. In truth, the more time I spent alone, outdoors, the more feral I became. If I saw another person, even a vehicle with people in it, I'd dive into the woods and hide from them, peeking out over a dead log through the tree cover until it has passed. I never spoke to anyone, except once or twice, to a Bryan, a Vietnamese boy about my age. I didn't know what to say, so I said hi and ran off into the woods again.

I think they couldn't imagine that my time outdoors could be passed in such a boring (to them) manner, which is to say, in the absence of other people. I was anything but bored, though. I searched out the deer trails, looks for tracks and sign, and used the trails as much as or more than the human roads and paths. I ate the wild foods I found (kinnikinic berries, thimbleberries, serviceberries, wild apples and pears, cattail down, etc) and forgot at times that I was human. I climbed high into trees and spent an hour or two up there, watching everything that went on around and below me. When I was up high like that, all our troubles at home seemed small and insignificant, far away. I took moss, vines, young shoots of shrubs, birch bark, and made baskets and other items, stowing them in hiding places I'd made in my favorite wild spots. I felt myself becoming a feral, solitary thing...and I loved it.

Sometimes the dogs came with me, especially Bruno. I loved his company, but it was harder to see any wildlife when a dog was with me. He fell down quite a bit as his hips would hardly support him. I waited for him, and he dragged his failing back half behind him.....just to be with me, even though I begged him to stay home.

In the fall, someone somewhere does something to regulate or lower the level of Priest Lake. It involves dams and the Pend Oreille river, but I don't know much more than that. What I do know is that when the water recedes, you can find all sorts of stuff along the shoreline. I was looking for pretty stones, newly uncovered, skipping flat ones across the water, when I stumbled about something man made protruding a little from the sand. I unearthed a rusty old knife with a layered leather handle. I was ecstatic even though I was clearly useless. A few more paces, and I found the leather sheath, in sorry shape but still marginally usable. I brought the knife home as though it were a trophy. Mike was clearly jealous at first, and then sneered in derision, saying it was just junk. Dennis' interest was keener and more controlled. He asked to see it, and then it just sort of vanished. In the dinner commotion, I forgot about the knife for a few hours. Later that night, I noticed something in Dennis' hands. It was a knife with a leather handle, but the blade was bright and sharp. He was playing with it with an expression of satisfaction and material pride on his face. I watched him, and the longer I looked at the knife, the more convinced I was that it was the same one I'd found. I asked him. At first, he claimed it was his, one he'd had for a while, or had just bought soemwhere, or some such tale. But I could tell he was lying, he was too defensive, and he was admiring it too much for something he'd had for some time, so I persisted. Finally he laughed and said that yes, it was the same one, he'd cleaned it up, and gave it back. How I loved that knife, how I cared for it and hid it and kept watch over it....and I have it still.

Snowfall came. The pursuit of firewood became a regular activity. Dennis had determined that Christmas was a pagan holiday and we wouldn't be celebrating it. We had to listen to long tirades and sermons on the subject, and he did the same with nearly every person he called (a highly extroverted person, he was on the phone for hours at a time, often with total strangers such as hapless telemarketers who were foolish enough to call our residence). Anything even faintly related to Christmas was purged from our house.

Instead, we kept Thanksgiving. To make up for the lack of Christmas, we decided that we'd exchange Thanksgiving presents. Of course there was no money (Dennis had long ago bled every single penny out of us for gas money or food, even to the point of having us search in the crevices under the cushions of the upholstered furniture), so we made all our gifts. We used scraps of fabric, embroidery thread, odd and ends around the house, the apples we'd dried, pine cones, birch bark, things like that. I made Mike a whistle out of an old wooden stamp and pieces of cut paper. The sound of it varied depending upon which paper was inserted into it. I made dolls or stuffed animals or hair things for the girls. Lisa gave me a small pillow made of the sleeve of an old nightgown; my children use it now. Dennis brought me a gyro from Spokane, a food I sorely missed from Chicago, and for Lisa, two cans of black olives. From the food bank, we got a Thanksgiving box with a turkey. This year and for years to coeme, Thanksgiving was more or less the only holiday we had.

Life became more restricted and controlled by the day. Clowns, playing cards, chess sets, heart shapes, crosses, rabbits...the list of forbidden objects, symbols, and activites seemed insurmountable. We were forced to throw favorite books (the Chronicles of Narnia), toys (the stuffed rabbit a favoite aunt had made for me), dolls (Barbies and Cabbage Patch), and clothing into the stove and watch it burn. Of course, Denis's belongings were hardly ever "evil". Still, the purge wasn't thorough enough. Mom kept praying and asking Yahweh, but she still felt that there was an "open door" (to evil, allowing demons and evil spirits to enter our house)that we hadn't closed. More and more stuff got thrown away, and we weren't allowed to show any reluctance about it, either...we were supposed to be happy to be freeing ourselves of the chains of Satan, even in the guise of a cute toy or, in Lisa's case, half a closet full of forbidden sweaters and other clothing. Mom was appalled and angry when she discovered that my sister has been unable to offer up the sweaters dotted with not one, but many hearts all over! No wonder we were still plauged by contention and fighting and Mom couldn't sleep well at night! No wonder she had to spend hours praying in the darkness, protecting her family! It was all because of these sweaters. Lisa had endangered our entire family by hanging onto them, only because they were given to her by our Grandma Hill, the woman who had raised her, whom she missed, and whom Mom bitterly resented for "keeping her children from her". For once Lisa, the favorite, was viewed with suspicion. Luckily, Denis came to her rescue and smoothed things over, which didn't, of course, alter the fact that the clothes had to be burned.

There was so much drama, so much stringency, and all I wanted, for the most part, was to be left alone. Denis was so incredibly intrusive (he sometimes kept us awake for hours trying to pry into our brains, trying to force us to tell him all our thoughts) that this was getting fairly difficult. I had my ways though. I stayed up late at night, poring over the high school biology text which had belonged to Renee and Michelle (it was the only science book we had), peering into my microscope at insect parts (fascinating), or blowing into the cold air out the open window, into the light clamped outside my window (I liked to see the patterns of air movement and could do this for hours, thinking). I had a single forlorn houseplant in my room, and I planted a date seed, lentils, birdseed, anything I thought might grow, all in the same 8" pot. One day Denis decided houseplants were evil, a remnant of the wicked hanging gardens of Babylonia, and that I couldn't have my plant anymore. I had to empty the contents out. As I did, tears rolling down my face, I discovered the shoot of the date seed, planted months before. It had been just about to break through the surface. It seemed to me that nothing joyful or even remotely satisfying was allowed in our household anymore.

I had no one to talk to. This actually was nothing new, I had always been a strange child without any close friends, but in combination with the cultural and social isolation, it was even getting to me. It must have been even harder for my very sociable sisters. I had a lot of questions, ideas, areas of interest that wanted exploring, and we didn't even have access to a library except on the rarest of occasions. Of course, the animals were there, and I talked to them as if they were people, because to me, they were just as interesting, maybe more so.

I didn't know at the time that I had Asperger's syndrome, and neither did my family. My mom chattered on about what an odd toddler I'd been, how I wouldn't wear clothes, how I only walked on my tiptoes, how I was inconsolable without my favorite blanket, forcing her to make the long trip back home for it if she forgot to bring it with to the daycare. They criticized my countless aberrant behaviors and eccentricities, mocking me openly even in front of company (we occasionally had other very religious people over to visit on Sabbaths). They said that my inability to conform and be just like everyone else was evidence of a rebellious spirit, and many hours were spent praying for me and trying to cast out the spirit of rebellion from me. So I stayed to myself, stayed up late at night until 1-2 in the morning and slept in late, escaping from them into my dreams where anything could happen, where I was free. I slunk off into the woods, or up in a tree, or behind a big stump with one of the dogs or cats. I spent a lot of time drawing, mapping out diagrams of my ideas, or just thinking on paper, doodling stuff in order to generate more ideas. Someone had given us a few Discover magazines, and I read them over and over, trying desperately to understand them even though much of it was over my head due to a gap in education. I talked out loud to myself, argued out loud with mysef, played mental videos of things that had occurred before (I had and have a photographic memory) and laughed out loud at some things, or groaned with chagrin at embarrassments, sometimes hitting myself on the head. My hands fidgeted constantly; tapping on hard surfaces to the rhythym of a classical piece playing in my head, or worrying some object to tatters, flinging a yo-yo...at one time I was even attempting to polish a piece of obsidian by hand and simply carried it around with me, rubbing the surface with another piece of stone. My mind was (and is) just as restless: I'd pick a word, such as "pink", and take the "ink" off of it. Then I'd go through the alphabet and try to match it up to each letter in turn to make words (dink, fink, kink, link, mink, pink, rink, sink, tink). The more words there were the better. If the results were unsatisfactory, I'd go through the letters again, allowing words such as blink, brink, and clink. This is only an example, I had lots of similar exercises to play with. I frequently employed them when we were forced to sit for hours listening to Denis pontificate on some hopelessly redundant or overbearing subject, or while Mom prayed out loud for a whole hour. Sometimes they stood me in the corner. I didn't mind, because the wood paneling made lots of neat apptterns for me to find animals and other shapes and ideas.

I paid very little attention to the weather or to my own appearance. I liked the weather whatever it was (especially rain) and since I lived in my head most of the time, I often forgot that I had a body. I knew intellectually that I had a body, but I didn't particularly identify myself with it. For example, they once forbade me to go on my daily walk. I was accustomed to walking, running, and climbing several miles a day, and I felt quite suffocated at this restriction. So, I locked my bedroom door, tied a heavy nylon rope to my bed frame, and threw it over the sill of my 2nd story window. I threw my backpack to the ground, as well as my leather gloves (I didn't know it yet, but throwing the gloves down was a huge mistake). I had visions of cascading slowly and gracefully to the ground as the lady in the James Bond movie "Octopussy" had done. However, when I clambered out the window and put my weight to the rope, I was on the ground within half a second and a resounding thump on the soles of my feet. It was a little scary. Worse, all the skin of my palms had been peeled off by the rough surface of the rope. My hand were raw. I shrugged, put the gloves on, and set off on the walk. The hands didn't bother me again until after I came home and got scolded. I simply forgot I had them except when I paid attention to them.

Perhaps one can see why they decided to start calling me "stupid", "retarded", and many other names indicating a lack of identity with me. I was strange. I did strange things. I asked odd questions. I forgot to brush my hair or to change my clothes. I went out in the pouring rain and came in soaked through with a beaming smile on my face, dripping water and leaving muddy tracks. I sat alone on the porch holding one sided conversations with animals or with nobody at all, because there was nobody I felt close to.

One of the constant threats to our family was perceived to be school. In other words, our folks were afraid that if the authorities found out we weren't in public school, we might be forced into it or wind up in foster care. They prepped us for hours on how to withstand interrogation by social workers, how not to give out any information at all to anyone that could possibly incriminate us, even very innocent things such as our names, ages, where we lived, whether we had pets, etc. We were told that everyone outside of our household was our enemy, period.

Also because of this danger, we weren't supposed to show our faces outside during school hours. Obviously this conflicted with my walks, but did mesh well with my nocturnal habits. If I went walking during school hours (and I wasn't supposed to), I shunned human contact even at a distance. I'd dive behind a log if I saw or heard a car approaching...they might report me to CPS.

Mom wanted us to keep journals of our "school activites". She said we had an "integrated curriculum". This meant that baking cookies or bread was as good as doing math from a book, because it used measurements and fractions, and chemistry and home ec, too. However, we weren't to log the activity as "baking cookies", we had to write it down as "fractions" or "science", or "home ec". We were supposed to find enough activities like this to account for several hours per day. My natural habits already afforded ample entries for science and reading/english, but I frequently forgot to write it down, because it felt false and contrived to me. I took samples of plants and pressed them, collected mosses and lichens, insects and stones, but I had no idea what species most of them were. We were to present our notebooks to Mom on a regular basis.

One day, we didn't have enough recent entries, or maybe we'd been playing outside, or maybe we weren't doing enough work around the place. Denis called us all together and announced that we were going to school in the morning. He told us how horrible it would be and how we'd have to sit on the bus for over an hour each way, but it was our own fault, because we hadn't done our part. We all crept upstairs to our rooms feeling as though we were about to be thrown to the lions. Only Lisa seemed a little happy. She confided that she missed school and thought she might even like it, even though she was scared, too. The next morning, I searched through my clothes desperately, trying to find something nice enough to wear. We hadn't gone anywhere at all for clothes since leaving California. Sometimes other people would give us their hand me downs, but that was rare. Most of my jeans were shot, with ripped out knees. I had no idea what was "cool" in Idaho. Finally I got dressed and we all assembled downstairs, trembling. Denis dismissed us. We weren't going to school. He'd changed his mind. It was a test. He didn't tell us whether we'd passed or failed.

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.

On one of my first visits to Mark's house, I knocked on the glass door of his little A frame cabin and saw through the window that he was watching basketball on his T.V.. We weren't allowed to watch T.V. anymore, but I was so engrossed in other interests that I really didn't miss it. What surprised me was that he was watching it with the volume turned all the way down.
"I like to watch them", he said. "They're so graceful, they remind me of ballet dancers". I looked at the screen. They were graceful. I hadn't noticed that before. He didn't seem to mind my intrusion into his quiet world at all, in fact seemed happy that I'd come to visit. I observed my surroundings while he went to get me a soda, another item that I hadn't experienced in some time. The cabin was neat, spartan without seeming ascetic. The decorations and furnishings were just enough to lend interest without adding clutter. The earmarks of a careful, frugal person were everywhere. I don't remember what we talked about, only that I had an immediate affinity for the man. His presence was quiet and reassuring while maintaining that sharp edge of intelligence, yet it was all well peppered with humor and good naturedness. You could be silent without feeling awkward.
Mike knocked on the door, and with the addition of his impish company the conversation became more animated, and for me, more awkward. Mike was constantly making me feel stupid, and had picked up many of Denis's taunts and ridicules. Most of the time though, our new friend was more interesting than teasing me. We told him of our plans to catch a deer with some sort of trap so that we could train it to let us ride it. Mike and I had spent hours discussing just how to do this, because we both missed the horses in Naples. To our surprise, Mark shook his head sadly and said that the deer struggled enough to get by, that we should leave them alone. He countered this disappointment by asking us questions so that we told him how we'd ridden horses, the other animals we'd had, and so on. Mark liked animals, and seemed to have a soft spot for poor old Bruno, saying the the mere sight of the harmless old Saint Bernard would be enough to deter would be thieves and trespassers. We learned that because of his work, he traveled quite a bit, and had spent time overseas, a detail which made him even more fascinating to us.
The next time we went to visit Mark, he had a gift for me, a Horse Illustrated magazine. I was ecstatic; the cover featured a Palomino stallion, and Palominos were just the sort of horse I'd wanted to have someday. I read that magazine from cover to cover over and over again until I knew most of the advertisements as well as the articles. He took us to the sled dog races nearby, an event we wouldn't have been able to go to otherwise, and we got to help hold the dogs from running before it was time for them to start. He was fixing the fiberglass shell on his snowmobile, and said that once it was through, he'd take us for rides on it. He took out his former wife's skis and lent them to me, so that instead of walking everywhere through the snow, I could ski, gliding along silently. And whenever we went there, he had a store of just the type of soda we liked best.

Mark was more than a friend to us; he was a window into a world we'd never seen before. His presence was an escape from the complex, overbearing, and irrational belief system that dictated our every move, which isn't to say that we disobeyed our beliefs when we were with him. It was more like we could forget about them and just be kids again for a change, because life was growing ever more complicated at home. And then, in the middle of all this, we received word that my Dad and Uncle Charlie were coming to visit us.

There must have been a lot of stress relating to the visit, but I don't remember. We were expecting them one winter morning, and I was out walking on one of the small side roads that led to our house when a tiny blue car came down the road. The men inside it didn't look like locals, they were acting funny and smiling a lot for no apparent reason (as it turned out, they weren't used to driving a stick shift and were vastly amused by the small size of the car). I remarked to Mike that the guys looked funny, and he agreed. We watched the car as it went past us. It turned the corner and pulled in at our house! It was then that I realized that the men were my Dad and uncle Charlie.

Seeing him in the same space as my mom was truly surreal. He and Charlie seemed to like the log cabin, and admired it. I went to get my drawing to show them how my art had progressed, but they seemed only slightly interested in it, perhaps because I had handed them approximately a ream of drawings. The climate in the house was awkward, so before long we were invited to go out for pizza with them. We'd never eaten at the local pizza shack, and so this seemed incredibly luxurious to us. However, it also prompted the subject of our newfound religious beliefs, which were cause for concern in the Hill family. A debate over old testament food laws ensued, and the result must have been something of a truce, because we wound up eating a pizza without pork. Still, having to defend the beliefs that had been more or less imposed upon us was stressful. The only way to hold up under life with Mom and Denis was to commit to the same things that they did.

The visit went quickly. Charlie said he loved the area's beauty, that it reminded him of what the world of Narnia would look like. I was quiet...the CS Lewis books had been forbidden as Satanic, and I'd been forced to burn them. They met Mark, and he and my dad seemed to take a dislike to one another, especially after my dad asked questions that Mark considered personal. After a short cross country ski, they went back to Illinois. I hated to see uncle Charlie go. If there was one person who could have persuaded me to return to the Midwest, it would have been him; but of course, he was in college now and I would hardly see him. Instead, it would be the same old thing with my Dad and Marie trying to mold me into a perfectly feminine, ladylike, city girl.

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.

One might have thought that our descent into paranoia about objects as innocent as stuffed bunnies and children's clothing printed with hearts, coupled with frantic prayers on a regular basis to keep evil spirits away, was about as kooky as people could get. That would be incorrect. We were in fact merely on the edge of a precipice, but we didn't know that. We thought everyone else was misguided. After all, the Bible has a lot to say about a path so narrow that few would find it, that many would claim to know Jesus (oops, Yahshua) only to be cast into the lake of fire. We knew that many were called and few are chosen, and we were absolutely certain that we were the chosen ones. It could have been that the stress of our life was getting to all of us. Maybe we'd read the story of Samuel a few too many times. Perhaps we were taking the Bible too literally.

It was evening, and we were all in our rooms. My sisters were probably listening to Amy Grant and chatting about girl stuff. I was probably reading a book or drawing. We didn't hear anyone call Mike. But he did. He ran downstairs, but Denis claimed he hadn't called him. By the third time, both Mike and Denis were frustrated. But then Denis thought of the boy Samuel. He instructed Mike to go back upstairs. If anyone called him this time, he should stay there, and say "Here am I", and listen closely. Mike obeyed these odd directions, went back upstairs...and was soon back down again, breathless.
"He said, Your name is!" Mike gasped. Mom and Denis waited, but that was all Mike said.
"Your name is what?" , they asked.
"I don't know, he didn't say! He just said your name is".

So they told him to return upstairs and wait for the rest. When he came back downsatirs, slowly, he looked puzzled. He asked if Raphah was a name. They weren't sure, so they looked it up. It was. It meant "heals" as in, "Yahweh heals". It was decided that Yahweh had spoken to Mike and his name was to be changed to Raphah. We all wondered whether Mike's name was the only one to be changed. Would the rest of us get new names, too? The Bible said we would. We were all instructed to go to our rooms and pray to see what our names were.
I wasn't big on the idea of hearing voices. How would I know if it were my own thoughts or not? Usually when they wanted me to pray for an answer, all I heard was silence and my own worrying fears about what would happen if I came back down with no answer at all. So I asked for the name to show on the first page the Bible randomly opened to. If no female names were on that page, obviously I wouldn't be getting a new name. The Bible opened to the story of Rebekah in Genesis. Was Rebekah my name? I tried it again, and again the book opened to that page. I went downstairs and told them my name was Rebekah. They told me they already knew, Lisa, who would be Sarah now, had heard that Rebekah was my new name. Gia was now Rachel. Mom went from Mary to Miriam, and Denis was now Eliyah, a name which pleased him mightily since he related to the fierce, judgmental prophet Elijah.

Since Lisa/Sarah was good at hearing from Yahweh, they had other questions for her. The rest of us were to retire to our room and give thanks for our new names and sing praises to Yahweh for gracing us with these gifts. The excitement was so keen that nobody could sleep. There was a lot of whispering and quiet talking downstairs between Mom, Denis, and Sarah. A few days later, the news was broken to the rest of us: another prophecy had been received.

The prophecy stated that Mom was going to have another baby. This in itself would have been miraculous, since her tubes had been tied years ago, but it didn't stop there. This baby was going to be special. He was going to be the prophet Elijah reborn in the flesh. The book of Malachi states that before the end, Yahweh will send the prophet Elijah. The end times were near, and Yahweh was sending the prophet Elijah- to us! To our family! We were beside ourselves with jubilation. The prophecy also stated that we were to notify all of our friends and family of this news, so that it would be a sign to them, and that it would also be an indication that our names truly had been changed. Mom promptly wrote up the letters and had us all sign with our new names. We sent them to all our our family. Oh, and one other detail: we were to have complete faith, we must not doubt for a second, that baby Eliyah was coming to us.

Remembering to use our new names took some getting used to. It was particularly difficult to get other people to use the new names. Mark was an exception. He adapted with very little argument or explanation, probably having already decided our parents were crazy. The prophecy about Baby Eliyah was a much more difficult issue, especially for people who knew that Mom's tubes were tied.
Other things were changing, too. The landlord was visiting us a lot, having what seemed to be serious discussions with our parents which we were not permitted to listen to. More importantly from our family's perspective, the prophecies hadn't stopped with our new names and the news of Baby Eliyah. We were all frequently employed to pray and ask Yahweh about answers to various questions. Often we didn't even know what the question was, they would just tell us to go ask Yahweh what to do. We didn't need to know the question because He knew it. I had a harder time hearing Yahweh than the others. Even when I thought I might hear something, I suspected it was my own imagination, imagining what might get me out of the predicament of waiting in a quiet room for a hour or two trying to come up with answers to questions I didn't know of. I began imagining Yahweh telling us that our trials on earth were really pretty trivial in the greater scheme of things, and that we should simply praise him for the wonderful things he would do for us, and for the small blessings we had. A typical reply of this nature might read:

"Behold, my beloved children, why do you worry about things of the world? Do I not care for all of creation? Trust ye me not? I say unto thee, not a sparrow falls to the ground, nor doth a balde of grass groweth without my knowledge of it. Trust ye in me, my children! Sing praises unto me and be glad! Thus saith Yahweh thy Creator and father."

This got me off the hook of agonizing over answers, worrying whether I was hearing my own mind, tormented by parental stress and pressure, or Yahweh, or maybe it was Satan or an evil spirit trying to deceive us. If I wrote down a false reply, I would be a false prophet deserving of death. My sister Sarah had far more fruitful results, a fact which was not lost on my parents. She was considered more obedient and closer to Yahweh even before the prophecies started. My new name, Rebekah, meant "to bind with beauty", but the common translation was "yoke", and they often agreed that I was definitely a yoke and a burden, even when introducing me to people we'd just met. "This is Rebekah. Her name means yoke, she has a rebellious spirit and is a burden". They felt I was rebellious because I always, continuously, thought outside of the box they wanted to cram me into. They spent a lot of time trying to cast the rebellious spirit out of me.
I didn't realize it at the time, but our situation was becoming increasingly desperate and untenable. Denis couldn't seem to find a job, Mom never looked for one, the rent was a few months late, and our frozen bread, TVP, dried foods, and the venison Mark shot for us was virtually all we had to eat...except for the omnipresent lentils and oatmeal. Still, Denis found a way to have his coffee, his eggs cooked in real butter and his steak, all served, of course, on his favorite plate with the silverware that only he was allowed to use.

Sheba's belly hung lower every day with the burgeoning life of growing puppies. Meanwhile, Bruno, my tired, beloved St. Bernard, grew weaker and feebler. We didn't allow him to follow me out on my walks anymore. He could hardly keep his back end upright for more than a few minutes at first; as time went on, he could lift the swaying dead weight of the hips and rear legs up for only a second or two before they collapsed under him. Sweet Bruno wasn't a whiner though...he never got crabby as some dogs in chronic pain would. Occasionally he would manage to get out of the house (where he was now allowed to stay despite Denis' ban on indoor pets, simply because he was so old and in such bad shape, and besides, he never got into anything) and would try to follow me. I'd look back and see the trusty old dog dragging his hindquarters through the snow as fast as he could, trying to catch up with me, leaving the snow smeared with blood in his wake. The most heartbreaking thing about it was that he seemed to think it was worthwhile to go through all that just to be with me. Ah, to be truly worthy of such love and devotion....Getting him back to the house was just as bad because he was far too big for me to carry. It became clear that his days were dwindling and I spent a lot of time brushing out his thick coat while he lay on a blanket next to the woodstove. And then one day he was just gone. They said he'd followed me on one of my walks and didn't return, but I later found out they'd taken him out and shot him to put him out of his pain. It was the kindest thing to do, but I think we both deserved a chance to say goodbye.

I loved Bruno more than any dog I'd had before and more than any I've had since. In his absence, I curled up with Sheba on the floor and felt the puppies writhing within her. I prayed and prayed that one of them would be Bruno's, just one. I tried to imagine what it might look like, which one of the wiggling lumps might be his puppy. I asked Mom and Denis if I could keep one of the puppies if it was his, but they couldn't imagine how one of them could be his, anyway. Mike/Raphah smirked knowingly at me behind their backs...I made a face at him.

Mark came up to the Lake for the weekend (indeed, I'd seen his headlights from my bedroom window as I stayed up late with my books and microscope). Mom and Denis had been acting sort of weird about Mark lately. I couldn't quite figure it out.Anyway, they admired him and it was nice to have intelligent, cultured company, so Mom wanted to make him a cake, and I wanted to learn how to cook. The trouble was, we had almost nothing to bake with. There was almost no flour, no butter, none of the things you need to make a cake. So under her instruction, I made a cake with farina and only a very small amount of flour. We used some of our own plum jam (made with free plums people didn't want to pick last fall) to drizzle over the bundt-shaped cake after it was done, and it looked pretty nice. After dinner (which was probably just lentil soup or venison stew, but Mark never complained, being always a gracious guest) we gave him the first piece. He liked it so well he wanted the recipe, and Mom and I were left looking at one another helplessly, for we couldn't have made another just like it if we tried!

At times I grew very depressed, feeling stifled and constantly controlled to the nth degree by our family and our increasingly constrictive beliefs. Outside of our family, Mark was the only person I had to talk to. Only, it was funny, these things didn't need to be said. He somehow knew and understood. Mike/Raphah and I clung to him as if to a life preserver, even though we were silent much of the time and rarely disclosed much in the way of forbidden family secrets (in other words, anything at all). On one occasion, we were riding in his car, and I was so depressed that I was thinking to myself that it would be easier to die. But I didn't say so. Out of the silence, Mark started talking about how sometimes it was harder to live than to die, but that it was worthwhile to live. This sort of silent understanding, an ability to see beyond the facades, to say what mattered and to comfort us when we needed it most, endeared us to him.

Winter seemed to stretch on endlessly, which was compounded by the fact that we couldn't eat more often to relieve our boredom. Besides, the food was boring too. How many pieces of dry toast with orange marmalade, or bowlfuls of lentil soup or venison stew can you eat before they become uninteresting?

We played board games, sewed, made stuff out of whatever materials were at hand, listened to music, read our bibles. I especially liked the Old Testament, both for the endless small details and because the characters were rarely perfect. Even Abigail, the righteous Abigail, snuck off against her husbands orders and presented the fugitive David with food and gifts and said her husband was stupid! For a woman to say that about her husband and master in Yahweh's eyes seemed scandalous and oddly thrilling. Denis/Eliyah spent a lot of time reading the bible, mispronouncing things, and preaching at us. It annoyed me because he got a lot of his facts wrong, like confusing Abraham with Moses, or Joseph with Jonathan. Also, after his name change, he seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time reading aloud about the prophet Elijah and pretending to be just like him, calling angry bears down from the mountains to rip up anyone who dared disrespect him. He thought that was very appealing, far more than any of the non-violent things the prophet had done.

If there was no particular family member to persecute, lecture, shame and denounce for hours on end, there were still other solutions to the boredom. We could have a rubber band fight. We used only the thick light brown bands, and Eliyah/Denis owned the bag of them. Moreover, he had a paint paddle that he'd notched to receive six bands that he could use as a rubber band gun for better aim and to prevent reloading between each shot. Needless to say, none of us had such a gun, nor did we have any rubber bands. If we had, they would have been taken from us anyway. There were still four of us against him though, and although our sisters either cired after a few hits or gave up, Raphah and I kept diving for the bands, waiting until he ran out and had to reload, or until he stooped to pick one up from the ground. Even so, we couldn't pull them back as far as he could with his paint stick, and he typically aimed for the face, while we were not allowed to. Raphah started wearing goggles to protect his eyes, and then graduated to a full snowsuit as well, which, of course, took all the fun out of hitting him in Eliyah's point of view, since he'd no longer scream and jump.

I rolled newspaper up tightly on the diagonal into a solid rod, folding one of the weaker corners in as I rolled. The other corner I bent to make a D shapecurving back toward the rod. Voila, I had a sword! Of course, Raphah immediately made one too, and then we could have sword fights. That was fun. He kept making very long swords, which I made fun of. Mine was fairly short but strong, while his broke because the paper had been invested in length. Then he started putting sticks into the cores of his swords (he had gone through several and I still had my original) and it wasn't fun anymore. The idea was never to inflict damage, it was just supposed to be rowdy playacting.

Sometimes the diversions weren't much fun. Eliyah liked to pit us in fights against each other. The more hairpulling and squealing there was, the more he enjoyed it. He would order three to attack one person. I didn't like that sort of thing; he enjoyed seeing how far he could push me with the other kids before I would try to defend myself. Throughout all these games, my mom never intervened beyond standing on the sidelines and begging her husband to stop

It was about this time that Denis/Eliyah started talking about how he was going to sell the girls in the family to good husbands, how he would "trade us for many ponies, rifles, and blankets". I didn't care for the idea of being sold off to the highest bidder. I already had a pretty good idea of who I wanted, though I never spoke of such things. When we objected, he just leaned back in his chair, fingers interlocked across his ample belly, and chuckled, repeating the part about many ponies, rifles and blankets, looking us over appraisingly.

Sarah's name meant "princess", and she held her head high as she also announced his disdain for this idea, but he remained undeterred. He then prattled on about how we should marry rich older men, much older, so that by the time we hit our thrties, our husband would be dead, we would have inherited everything, and could then have the freedom to marry for love. I hated this idea passionately. Money meant little to me, and the idea of planning to benefit by some poor old man's demise was abhorrent. Another problem was how on earth they were going to manage selling me off to anyone at all; I was such a tomboy with almost no domestic skills, not any interest in developing them. Attempts to feminize me were more or less wasted....

And every Friday evening, while the family slept, bellies full of the Sabbath meal's lentil soup, I sat by the window watching the patterns of my breath curling into the cold air, lit by the light which was always clamped onto the outside of my windowsill, and watched for headlights descending down the curve of the dirt road, to see if they'd turn in at Mark's driveway. I always knew if he was there.

Sheba finally went into labor in the garage, and of a litter of six puppies, only one was Bruno's, a little female. I called her Beauty and asked if I could have her to fill the space left by Bruno's death, but my parents were noncommital. The fact of the matter was that we had too many dogs already and no real way to feed them. Rachel/Gia was charmed by the warm brown tones of Beauty among all the black and white pups and started fawning on her, saying Beauty would be hers. I decided to pick a new favorite; one of the male puppies had a very wide white stripe down his face, making him look clownish. I picked him, naming him Bandit. By the time they were six weeks old, Eliyah had a favorite as well, the dominant pup, Kodiak. Another male was black with fawn markings and no white at all; Rachel picked this one, forgetting about Beauty, and named him Alaska.

When Mark saw the puppies, he noticed Beauty right away and chuckled that it looked like Bruno had been a dirty old man. I avoided meeting Raphah's eye and blushed as Mom and Eliyah wondered aloud how Bruno could possibly have sired that puppy. We asked Mark if he wanted a puppy, and after playing with them all, he decided he would...he always had a soft spot for animals. He decided that he would pick a puppy and that he and I would share it, since he couldn't take it back to the Tri-Cities with him. He would pay for the dog food, shots, etc, and I would give the puppy love, attention, and training. We had already trained the puppies to sit and come on command by tossing precious nuggets of dog food to the ones that obeyed. They caught the food in mid air; and quickly associated the food with the action and command. Mark cuddled Beauty a lot, and asked me which one I'd like. Beauty was the one I should have picked, but at times Rachel still insisted she was hers, so I showed Bandit to him instead. His eye went wistfully back to Beauty, and I wish I'd picked her instead, but he decided that Bandit was pretty cute too, promptly blowing a raspberry on his tummy as though the pup were a toddler. Bandit's head was broad and massive, as Bruno's had been. It's possible he was Bruno's as well, since he did grow into a large dog, but he had Sheba's active temperament rather than Bruno's steady, sweet demeanor as Beauty did.

From then on, Mark wrote me letters while he was gone, and I was allowed to write him back, even though all letters (incoming and outgoing) would be thoroughly scrutinized. He sent money for dog food and parvo shots, begging me not to spend it on New York Seltzer (a thought which offended me a little- I would never have done that!). Eliyah promptly took all the money and spent it on food and gas. He said it was Mark's way of helping us, that the money wasn't really meant to dog food and shots, Mark was just being tactful. When Mark wrote me a week or two later and asked if I'd gotten Bandit the parvo shot, I didn't know what to say....I felt that I'd failed him, but didn't know what to do about it.

After chosing Bandit, we didn't see Mark for a while. Perhaps he was busy in D.C....at any rate, a couple of months went by without him. In that short time, spring arrived and several things of import occurred.

We ran out of food. I mean that there was almost nothing at all to eat other than the lentils. Raphah and I made the mistake one day of mentioning that Mark had shown us where the key to his cabin was if we needed to use his cabin for some emergency. Eliyah decided that our food shortage was just such an emergency, forced us to show him where the key was, and started bringing food from Mark's cabin to our house. We thought this was stealing, but our parents insisted that we would pay him back and he'd never know. I thought of all that our friend had done for us already and felt that I would rather go hungry than to take his food without his permission.

We received notice from our landlord that we would have to move. We had no money for food, so we certainly didn't have any money to rent a new place. The specter of homelessness, a new concept for every one of us, was now staring us directly in the face. Our parents had us ask Yahweh where we would go, but all we could offer were assurances to have faith. In the meantime, we had to pack up everything, even though we had absolutely no idea where it would be moving to, and it had to be done quickly. Only the most basic necessities were left unpacked, everything else went into boxes.

We gave all the puppies away at the Tamrak convenience store/gas station except for Bandit, Kodiak, and Alaska. Beauty found an owner who seemed to really love her. We had to move all of Eliyah's lumber collection, but where? Don and Helen said we could move it there and store it on their property. We also somehow wound up with a small, egg shaped travel trailer from their place, and of course we still had the old Airstream trailer, even though it was crammed full of stored stuff. About this time, my parents received a letter from Mark. They read it to us as we packed. He said that he had a difficult choice to make, because there were three women he had to choose from. He would be bringing one of them to his cabin at some future point. I wondered who the other two women could be and felt a sting of resentment towards the lady we would soon meet. Many years later, Mark told me of how my parents had offered me in marriage to him. I have no idea whether it was supposed to be some sort of financial transaction or not. He said he'd declined because he felt that at 15, I was too young...

Meanwhile, we focused on relocating our family. The lumber was moved, everything was packed up. The big question was, where were we going to move to? As usual, we, the children, were told nothing until it actually happened. We were moving onto Mark's property, without his knowledge or permission. Perhaps my parents intended this as a stop-gap measure, or to have found a permanent place before he came back. At any rate, telling Eliyah that Mark had given us emergency access to his cabin was turning out to backfire in ways we'd never intended or imagined.

So we packed everything into the Airstream trailer. Then they backed the truck up to the house and we filled the back of the truck with stuff, too. Mom and Eliyah were stressed and irritable; nobody could seem to do anything right. The loaded truck started and pulled forward as we stood to the side. It was then that I noticed my beloved cat, Ricotte, the same one who'd learned to ride horseback with me, who leapt from the porch railing onto my shoulder and perched there as I walked. Ricotte, with her short, dense gray hair and green eyes and shy, quiet ways....she was writhing hideously on the ground, dying. Her head had been crushed by the tire of the truck. She was making a tortured sound as her body flailed helplessly. I must have cried out, because the truck stopped and my parents jumped out. Then they yelled at me for not watching my cat. They said it was my fault she was dying, even though nobody had seen her anywhere near the truck before it started to pull out. Mom said I should have taught her to stay away from vehicles, that I had made her so tame that she was no longer afraid of anything, so it was my fault. My beautiful cat, my friend, was dead, had died violently and in agony, and I had no one to turn to for solace.

The big Airstream trailer and the small egg shaped one were pulled into a bare grassy patch parallel to Mark's driveway. Mom and Eliyah promptly moved right into his cabin, but we children were disallowed from entering it except for mealtimes and other selected occasions. It was strange to see the solitary, refined, meticulous aura of Marks house being engulfed by the chaos of our household. I felt defensive about Mark's space every time they moved something from where he'd placed it; the whole thing felt like such a violation, particularly since he was such an intensely private person. Moreover, I was used to the place being a refuge from Mom and Denis, and now there were here, in it. That was jarring. At least his scent still clung to the place. What did he smell like? Sophisticated, woody, complex, intelligent.

If we children couldn't sleep in the house, where did we sleep? In the cars. It was still very cold at night since it was spring. My sister and I have different recollections of Mark's return. She recalls that he drove up with Elizabeth, saw all our vehicles there, and left her in the car while he went to see what was going on. That he came to our parents and said, "What are you guys doing here? Are you living here?", and told us that he was taking Elizabeth to lunch or something and that when he came back, they had to be out of his house, the house restored to its previous state. That's slightly different from what I remember, but memories are slippery things. Mark might have an entirely different take on it, I don't know. Here, then, is my version:

Mark drove up, alone. I don't remember his actual arrival. I am sure he was upset, but I must have been sheltered from it. Denis tried to bargain to do work on the place in exchange for staying there until we could find another place to live. Mark's deck had no step leading up to it; Denis has the lumber and skill, and could easily make one. We could rake pine needles, pick up brush, and so on. We were told that we had to get out of the house because he had to go to the airport to pick up Elizabeth. In the meantime, he had bought particular foods for her, foods that were never usually seen in his house, things like fancy Milano cookies by Pepperidge farm, Earl Grey tea, and so on. Because of our poverty, my siblings and I regarded these foods with a sort of awe. Just by looking at them, we could tell what sort of person this woman would be, and my resentment deepened, having not even met her yet. He rattled around his house restlessly, happy, excited, terribly nervous. He said that he felt like he was on his first date, and I realized suddenly that in effect, this time at his cabin would be their first date.

Denis was already building the step for the deck when he left. He assigned us to find a lot of "nigger head" rocks, oval, head shaped granite stones, to mark the edges of the path to the house. It seemed that hauling the wheelbarrows full of rocks took forever. We set them into the ground so that they wouldn't roll away. When we were done, two lines of rounded stones framed a pine needle duff path, winding to the new step. By this time we (Raphah and I) were tired of waiting for Mark to come back. We had no idea what Elizabeth would look like, other than the reflection granted us by Mark's actions and purchases. Would he still be the same Mark, or would he get all stuck up or too busy to hang out with us? Raphah went to do his thing, and I went for a walk. As I walked, I thought. I realized that making an enemy out of Elizabeth was a bad idea. Mark apparently really liked her. Alienating her would be alienating him. Or maybe I was so conflicted by jealousy that I wanted to cover it up by doing something nice. At any rate, I picked a beautiful big bouquet of flowers, some wild, and some from the house that was for sale. And then I came back to give them to her.

She was tall and slender, pale, quiet, and sophisticated with a page boy haircut. Elizabeth would have been quite at home with my family back in Chicago, her place of origin, but she was acutely out of place in Idaho, except perhaps at a high end resort. She looked decidedly uncomfortable and unsure of herself, surprised by this strange teenage girl in jeans and hiking boots offering her an armful of flowers. We fluttered around her like a flock of birds, hovering, retreating, approaching, but never touching.

Somehow (had he asked for her opinion?) my Mom had gotten the idea that it was the task of our family to inquire of Yahweh and help Mark select which woman was his soul mate, "the right one". Someone, not me, had received some prophecy stating that the true name of the right one was Patricia. This didn't mean that her name when we met her would be Patricia, only that her new name would be Patricia. This Patricia would be kind, gentle, loving. Elizabeth was cultured, well bred, and the sort of woman that any man would be proud to walk in with on his arm, but I wasn't sure that she was Patricia.

It wasn't that I didn't like her, because in spite of her very reserved nature and the differences between us, we did like her. But, one got the feeling that she was attracted to a different side of Mark, the brilliant, intellectual, polished side of him. I wondered if she knew about the side that could romp on the forest floor in abandon with kids and dogs, blow raspberries on puppies tummies, and do all sorts of other deliciously wild things, cutting very tight curves in the lake with his boat until we thought we might fall out, dangerous stunts on motorcycles, that sort of thing. At any rate, the choice was his...regardless of the prophecies my mother continuously delivered to him.

Mom and Dennis set up a tent and tarp arrangement for a cooking and living area on the land adjoining Mark's place, and set up the two trailers as sleeping quarters. Before that, Mark and Elizabeth had walked out early one morning to take his big old truck for a drive and found me sleeping on the front seat. We had been sleeping more or less wherever there was a dry place to sleep. Some of us, including myself, slept in the little egg-shaped trailer. Mom, Denis, and Sarah slept in the big Silverstream. There would have been more space, but everything we owned was also crammed into the trailers from floor to ceiling. Sarah slept in the bed with Mom and Denis. Mom complained to me one day, out of their earshot, about this arrangement. She said that Sarah was sleeping between them and that wasn't comfortable with this. I don't remember if my sister was afraid or stressed by the change in our living situation, or if that was simply the only place for her to sleep. At any rate, Mom was unhappy about it and felt threatened. I didn't know what to say.
Meanwhile, cats got pregnant, had kittens, some of which died. We narrowed Sheba's puppies down to Bandit, Kodiak, a dominant male who was Denis' favorite, and Alaska, a narrow, yappy male with a Labrador's temperament.
We were constantly on the lookout for supernatural creatures and signs, both good and evil. I was standing in the driveway one day when I thought I saw something that looked like a big black sasquatch type creature. It vanished into the small trees in front of Mark's house. I ran to tell Denis, and he said he had already seen it cross his path near the house on its way to the forest behind the house. We saw basketball sized orbs of bright white light floating in the air outside the house we'd been kicked out of. Yahweh told us that it was a sign of judgement upon our former landlord for kicking us out. Everything we saw was good or evil, nothing was insignificant or too small to be submitted as a question to Yahweh. It was Ok to tie a ribbon in a bow around the neck of a stuffed animal (the ones we had left that weren't evil), because bows were not a bad symbol.
Also, we were given a new last name: Yehiel, which means "Yahweh lives". This was a clever move, because it transformed a divided family with three different last names into a cohesive unit with a single, powerful last name, given to us by Yahweh himself. We knew that we were special, more special than any other people on the face of the earth, that we were very important and had a singular purpose in his plan. We knew and believed these things, because Yahweh had told us so himself, over and over again, through the lips and pens of children.

We spent most of that summer spending our time trying to resolve a prophesy that had been given to us. It was more of a puzzle than a prophesy: it stated that Yahweh would give us a new home, and that the house and land he would give us would be on West Branch road. "West Branch" was supposed to have some kind of spiritual significance, because Yahshua/Jesus was called the branch in the scriptures (even the word "bible" was verboten in our family). We wasted countless gallons of gas (where on earth did we get the money to buy gas when we would have gone hungry without the food bank?) searching for West Branch road, going as far as Spokane and driving down street after street as Denis asked us to pray and ask Yahweh where the road was. Of course, these forays were fruitless, and I still don't comprehend how our parents thought we would buy a place, when we had been evicted for non-payment of rent and couldn't even afford campground fees or food. But, the prophesies stated that Yahweh would give it to us, so we had faith and kept looking, even as the pressure from our parents mounted. We children were all terrified of being labeled false prophets, yet the insistence for us to come up with answers from Yahweh was relentless. It was horrible.

As for our stay at Mark's house, the stress of the situation brought out the worst in Denis. He got a large liver from somewhere one day, presumably deer liver. I cannot and never have been able to eat liver, but he served us each a slice anyway. I tried swallowing the bites whole, but it wouldn't go down. As always, he sat and reveled in the spectacle of being able to force a child to eat something disgusting. Finally I smeared a large quantity of mustard on each bite and was able to keep it down. Heaving it would only have resulted in being forced to eat more of the stuff.

Then there was the time he sat luxuriantly in a chair with a little jar of small round, red bubble shaped objects that he appeared to be eating. He offered us each one, and said it was caviar. Of course, we refused, but this was futile. There was no offer, it was a demand. I swallowed mine whole, despite his orders to pop it. About fifteen years later, I was in the sporting goods section of a store when I realized that the jars of red fish bait were the exact same thing he had fed us years ago......

And there was also the day when for some inane reason, I was playing with a lighter, seeing it it would ignite the needles of a cedar tree, having no inkling whatsoever what an incredibly bad idea this was. Denis happened to catch me, confiscated the lighter, and said I was a baby who was playing with fire. Then he sat me in a chair in the center of our outdoor living area, and told everyone that I was a baby and they were not to talk to me except as to a baby. I was to sit in the chair while I was jeered at and ridiculed. Elizabeth happened to walk by and view this spectacle. I was probably crying and looking very dejected. Miek came by and asked questions. I was allowed to leave the chair, but my shoes were taken away so that I would have to stay nearby. This infuriated me. I wandered into the woods and pulled up kinnikinnic vines, the same type I'd used to make baskets, and coiled and wrapped them into crude sandals. I was nearly done with the second one when Denis caught me at this, laughed at me, called me rebellious, and took that away too. He gave me back my shoes, though.

Mark brought his other girlfriend to meet us. Ann was totally unlike Elizabeth, and we liked her immediately. She was down to earth, outspoken, a little loud, friendly, funny, outgoing. It was impossible not to love her. She was not refined and cultured, but she was real, genuine, human. Yahweh told us right away that this was the true Patricia that Mark was supposed to marry. She and my mom quickly became the best of friends. Ann was fun, she liked kids; she also knew Mark far better than Elizabeth had, loved him openly and with abandon. It hurt her that she had to compete with another woman, but he meant the world to her and she was ready to fight for her man. We all rallied to her cause, told her it was Yahweh's will for her to marry Mark and vowed to help her however we could.

Meanwhile, Mom received a prophecy detailing the exact day on which she would conceive the baby prophet Eliyah. She strolled into the bedroom with an air of triumphant expectation. We were a little grossed out at the idea of Denis/Eliyah having sex with anyone, but we did hope we'd get a baby brother, so we hoped it'd work.

On weekends, we went to the Assembly of Yahweh in Spokane. They were far more mainstream than we were. We saw them as being too comfortable with the status quo to answer Yahweh's true calling. Yahweh told us that they were the church of Laodicea. Also, women had too much influence in their Assembly, a clear sign that their group was in Satan's clutches. After attending the service, we'd drive around aimlessly looking for West Branch road while Denis/Eliyah became increasingly irritated with us for being unable to hear Yahweh clearly enough to find the land he was going to give us.

The fall was coming and we were afraid. We had to be out soon. Mark had allowed us to stay the summer, and in return we'd graveled his driveway and done work on his place, but summer was nearly at an end. Rentals were scarce. We looked at a place or two, including a little cabin in Coolin, on the east side of Priest lake.

The dirt driveway took us to a little shack of a house. We tumbled out of the truck and ran off in all directions to explore the place despite Mom's protestations regarding danger and wild animals. There were big trees. The cabin was made of logs, with a few rows of horizontals, and then vertical logs. The chinking had fallen out in a lot of places; reportedly, the cabin had been built in 1912. it was a funky little place with a lot of glaring flaws and I loved it. The floor had linoleum which had been joined right in the center of the floor and nailed down crudely; the juxtaposition of the pattern created a huge blue zigzag down the middle of the floor. The cupboards were tilting and looked as if they might fall right off the wall at any moment. The bathroom was especially nice- it had old magazine pictures collaged all over part of one wall and wrapping around the corner to part of the southern wall. They were quaint and charming. The first bedroom was in the north eastern corner of the house and so it had logs for two of its sides. It was dark, lit only by a single window. There were old rags stuffed all around the window, apparently to stop drafts. There was a tiny, leaky pantry area. The kitchen, pantry, first bedroom, and bathroom comprised all of the original cabin. The remainder of the house was a more recent addition. It had a larger living room with unfinished drywall and a large picture window and another bedroom which was quite a bit nicer than the first one. This bedroom had cedar paneling and engulfed us in the woody fragrance. It also had at least two good sized windows. I stepped out the back door. The chimney was leaning precariously away from the house, held in place only by a length of chain fastening it to the house. All around me was a thick patch of wild roses full of ripe rose hips. I stood and munched on the rose hips and decided that I liked this place. It was right. It didn't have working plumbing, water, electricity, or insulation, but it was better than a tent or a trailer. Also, there were 10 acres for us to roam around on. I walked back to the front of the house. Sarah and Rachel were saying that the place was a dump, that we should leave already. Raphah and I were excited, even though he didn't like the place half as much as I did. It had its own swamp. It had a meadow and trees. It even had a funny little box with a lid standing about 40 feet away from the house. I mentioned this to Raphah and he started laughing.
"Yeah, but did you see what's in that box?" he guffawed. I went and looked. Old poop and toilet paper. How odd!
Denis/Eliyah thought that the place was far beneath his royal dignity, and Mom agreed. I seemed to be the only one who really liked the place. I argued with them all the way home.
"Where else are we going to live?"
"Yahweh will provide for us. We are his people," Mom replied.

I sat back in defeat. Why were they so willing to dismiss this place when it was the only one we'd seen that was even remotely within our means? I couldn't understand it. Did they honestly expect Yahweh to drop a 40 acre farm with a nice house right into our laps? Not that that wouldn't be nice......

They kept ordering us to pray and seek answers from Yahweh, and they told me that they weren't happy with the answers I received because they didn't answer the question. My answers always told us not to worry, to have faith and to sing songs, etc....because I didn't have any real answers. One day I got tired of being asked. They had sent me into Mark's room to pray, instructing us not to come out until we had answers. I had no idea where the other kids were praying. I closed my eyes and looked for that calm place within me. The answer came to me. Of course that little cabin wasn't the place he wanted to give us! It was a place for us to live until he gave us our true place. The prophecies about the place on West Branch weren't false, but the timing was off. We had to live in the little cabin until he would give us our true home. I wrote all this down with flowery, 16th century English and presented it to them. And just like that, we moved into the place.