Before I try to describe the events that ensued following our move to northern Idaho, I should give the reader at least a quick sketch of what led to the move, and how and why I was with my mother at all.

I wasn't raised by her. I was the inadvertent offspring of my mother, who was biracial and whose parents were divorced and remarried, which was almost unheard of in those days. My dad was the eldest son of a prominent doctor; his family probably had high hopes for him, maybe to follow in his father's footsteps by going to medical school. There was some talk of having me aborted, but instead they'd kept me and basically ruined both their lives as a result. They ended up getting married, and to be honest, I don't think they even liked each other. I think that my dad did love her, while she felt trapped by the motherhood she wasn't ready for and was compelled to do the dutiful, respectable thing. The only childhood memories I have of my parents in the same scene at the same time are upsetting. They both insist I couldn't possibly remember from that long ago, but I do and always have.

Anyway, when I was 3 and my sister a year and a half old, she waved cheerfully at us, peeking through the gap in the front door, smiled sweetly and walked right out of our lives. She nabbed me up a short time later, apparently having second thoughts, but her boyfriend didn't like me. I remember him glaring at me darkly. So she dropped me off on a street corner, having arranged for a family member to come and get me, and took off for good. My dad didn't know what to do with us either, so his parents and my mom's mother raised us until my dad had obtained an education and was ready for us. We lived in a small Midwestern town that I loved with all my heart. It was so small that everyone knew one another and it was safe for me to walk a number of blocks to school. There was a quaint little bakery with an indoor window where you could watch the cake decorator work his magic. I spent many happy hours chasing butterflies, dragonflies and other insects for my collection or crouching in the shade between the hedge and the house scrutinizing snail, slugs, berries, plants, seed pods and other small things. My uncles still lived with my grandparents and were close enough in age to me that they felt more like brothers. I was especially close to my Uncle Charlie. During a time of changes and stress as I entered school, he was a trusted and comforting figure I could always count on.

My maternal, Filipino grandma and her husband lived nearby and we spent a lot of time with them as well. My grandpa (not by blood, but blood means so little anyway) was a quiet, steady carpenter who only got ruffled when my pranks and antics were extreme and even then he was merely gruff. I loved tagging along with him to the hardware stores and puttering next to him in the garden. Grandma was more of a mother to me than my own had ever been, maybe because she wanted to make up for Mom's absence. I was a rather active, imaginative child who did inexplicable things without apology, but she hardly ever complained or scolded me. My sister liked shopping for clothes, so she and Grandma would go to the boring women's stores and look at purses and shoes for hours while Grandpa and I went to more interesting places. Although none of Grandma's family had come with her from the Philippines she was part of a seemingly huge and very close knit Filipino community of warm and loving women who cooked wonderful food and chattered rapidly in Tagalog. As her grandchildren we were also included in all sort of family get-togethers and festivals.

My paternal grandparents had a house so enormous that it was more of a mansion than a house. It was well built and old, with all sorts of interesting antiquated features, built in the Frank Lloyd Wright style. I loved that house passionately; Charlie and I were both upset when Grandpa sold it following my grandparent's divorce and said that when we grew up, we'd buy it back. There was something about the house that embodied what childhood should be. Grandpa bought another house, grand but not nearly as much as the first and Grandma got a practical split level on the other side of town. After that, things were never really the same. My dad moved back and took my sister and I in, but now I was the oldest and our rented apartment lacked the soul and warmth of the other house. I had no brother-like uncle to rely on and run to when I was sad or needed someone to talk to or roughhouse with. He lived with Grandma now, far enough away that I couldn't walk to visit him....and even when we saw him he was different, not happy go lucky anymore.

I missed our little town desperately when we moved to Chicago. I missed Uncle Charlie, the quiet familiarity of small town life, I missed my family, I missed being known as the doctor's granddaughter and having that small measure of respect. I missed my mother. I made up stories when people asked me where she was. She was famous. Or she worked in a candy factory and sent me all the candy I wanted (in reality, I stole the candy, but I think I wanted to believe that she had given it to me, because I almost talked myself into thinking it was true). Sometimes I thought that perhaps she'd died, because nobody ever talked about her, and if they did, it was in whispers, as of a scandal or something awful.

Life in Chicago was pretty wretched. I'm not saying it was all bad...there was the cultural diversity, the food, the museums, the concerts. But when it came to school, every day was an ordeal to be endured, a gauntlet of cruel children to be run through. My sister was popular and had a happy social life, but I seemed to be incapable of conforming to the norm. I actually tried (unsuccessfully) to pay or bribe other kids to be friends with me. They took the gift or money happily and then laughed at me when I asked if they'd be my friend now. There wasn't a label yet for children like me. Nobody knew that I had Asperger's. I could have been diagnosed with ADD, but I don't recall hearing about anyone having that, either. My father, and later his wife, deduced that the problem was my inability to conform, to be more feminine. Not only did I not know how to conform, I didn't want to, not anymore than I wanted to be "feminine", an idea sticky with ruffles and lace that I could not swallow. I couldn't cope as other children could; I couldn't focus in school. The humming of the fluorescent lights, the ticking of the clock, the rustling of papers and sounds of other children disrupted my concentration. Socially and academically, I was a failure. I withdrew into daydreams and fantasies of a happier world, of a world with a mom.

My dad was overwhelmed by the responsibility of raising two girls by himself, and his temper was often short. He married a really nice lady that my sister and I liked, but by this time we were half grown, and....he was the only parent we had really....as sweet as she was, there was still the sense that our father had been stolen away from us, that we were the outsiders, that I was the unwanted one....again.

So when we heard from our mother and she wanted us to visit her, the fruit was ripe for the picking. After the tearfully joyful reunion, she told us deep, dark things about our dad and how she'd wanted us all these years and they wouldn't let her see us. I think I have maybe 3-4 cards from her to show for my entire childhood....but that's not the point- we believed her. We had to believe her. To face the stark truth would have been devastating, and every child wants with their whole, entire heart to feel that their own mother loves them. When you look at it this way, we didn't have a choice. Our dad became the enemy, the villain who had so cruelly deprived us of our mother and the joyful childhood we should have had. You can see it even with livestock. A poor mother can stomp all over her lamb or kid and just about kill it, but take that kid away, and it bawls pitifully and loudly to be returned to its dam...even if the dam is eating calmly and unconcerned as her infant cries out for her. It doesn't matter.

After one month of ninth grade, we got what we'd cried and struggled and fought for, what we'd broken our more dutiful parent's heart to get: he sent us to live with our mom.

A snapshot from 1986: Meet the members of our family:

First, my full sister Lisa, since I grew up wih her: We look an awful lot alike. We both have dark eyes and dark hair, though mine fades to red in the sun (it was red as a child) and hers is vivacious and curly, sort of like her. We've been mistaken for twins before, and for one another at times. This annoys us both. Since early childhood, she has been the favorite, the cute, perky, cheerful one. When I feel jealous, I tell myself that she's overly cutesy and has a simplistic, fairly narrow-minded view of life in general. Our closeness has been marred by years of sibling rivalry and mutual longing for attention and affection, a limited commodity in our world, and she always seems to win, despite just being herself. Being lovable comes naturally to her. Although I have spent a lot of time in her shadow, envying her, I wouldn't want to be be her for all the tea in China, so I don't even try. If people can't like me for myself, I don't want them...but it always hurts, just the same.

She thinks I'm entirely too eccentric, off the wall, and too indifferent to cosmetic appearances and the newest styles in clothing. I am down to earth, zany, creative and fairly fearless about it. We're about as different as two full sisters could be: me, earthy and outdoorsy, always climbing trees, finding an animals to play with, or running down a hiking trail or building a fort; her, domestic, sedentary, playing with dolls, organizing her barrettes and hair ties, baking cookies (always from a recipe), brushing her hair or washing her face. It's sort of amazing that we share the same DNA, the same upbringing- a slap in the face of both the nature and the nurture schools of thought.

When my mother walked out the door, my mom climbed into a car with her Greek boyfriend as we watched from the window of our apartment, alone, crying until our father came home and found us there. She married the Greek man and they had two children, my half brother and sister:

Michael: Of all my siblings, Mike is the most like me, outdoorsy and active. He's little for his age, as we all are, due to the Filipino blood and for him, the Greek blood, too. He has olive colored skin, shining dark eyes, and glossy black hair. For his size, he's very macho and gutsy, very tough and surprisingly strong. He's quiet and serious. We got along well together most of the time. When we didn't, it was because he called me a stupid girl, as though I were of those girly girls like my sisters. Compact and somewhat explosive, out interactions have tended to be volatile at times, but still...aside from Lisa I am closest to him.

Gia: Youngest of the bunch (I am the eldest), she has the same olive skin as her brother. Her dark eyes are heavy-lidded and she is fairly calm and even tempered in nature. She has thick, rambunctiously curly back hair. She is easy going and rarely ever confronts anyone or outright causes trouble. Oh, she has a sassy mouth, but the things she says are always followed so quickly by her slow and gentle smile that it's easy to forget them.

Mom: Our mother is half Filipino, and the exotic blood permeates her features. She has her American father's strong rectangular jaw and chin, but it is offset by large, dark soulful eyes, high cheekbones and olive skin. Her hair is glossy and black. The early pictures of her, the ones we grew up looking at and wondering over for so many years, showed a shy, trusting, demure girl, with long straight hair. She looked so sweet, so beautiful. With time, she has grown more determined than demure. She is still the charming hostess and the Asian blood is kind to the women in our family as we age, but the harsh experiences of life have left her wary and a bit paranoid, and the superstitions she was raised with have only fallen away to give birth to others which are no less odd. She is enigmatic and difficult to understand, yet loving and affectionate, both generous in heart and critical in tongue. As with all of us, the hot blood comes out in her temper, which can be fairly frightening and then she is wildly irrational and unpredictable. I do not say that she is a bad person, but many of the choices she has made have been absolutely disastrous. To this day, we are never quite sure what to expect when we hear from her. One thing will be certain: it is never routine.

After my mom left the Greek guy (who was abusive), she met up with my stepdad:

Dennis is a big man. He's big boned and overweight, with a potbelly. Usually people who are big like he is are sort of awkward and seem slightly embarrassed by it, but not him! For a large man, he carries himself with surprising dignity and grace. His black hair is graying, and he has piercing black eyes that glint alertly. An ex-cop, he retains the "don't even think about messing with me" attitude. He's very sociable and outgoing, and has the ability to converse with almost anyone he meets. He's directly descended from Russian royalty as well as Napoleon Bonaparte...at least that's what he claims. My mother's family lineage also contains royalty (though less directly and not as impressive or well known), but we don't wear the prestige of it stamped all over our persons as he does. As far as he's concerned, he should be a king- it is his right! Instead, he dominates whatever else is within his domain.

Our arrival:

My mom and Dennis lived in Running Springs, California, in the San Bernadino mountains. Unlike much of Southern California, this area is temperate, heavily forested with evergreen trees, and receives a heavy snowfall in winter.

We expected that our dingy life in the big city had ended and that now with our mom back at last, life would be a wonderful, fragrant bed of roses, like the potporri she used in the crafts she sold. Her entire home was redolent with the fragrance of it... I could have a cat, something my dad hadn't allowed even when it was the single item on my Christmas and birthday lists. I could get to know my brother and sister. Yeah. Life was going to be great! We gorged ourselves on candy (something our dad had strictly forbidden in almost any amount) and laughed and giggled giddily. We ran, laughed loudly, goofed, played pranks, hugged, and talked almost non-stop. Delighted with the pleasant area we were in, I ran the woods, climbed the trees, scaled the rocks, and waded in the streams and built forts with my brother. Girls (our sisters) were not allowed. And for a while, it was very good.

Our dad, who paradoxically was stick thin but afraid of growing obese, had been alarmed at my growing teenage appetite and tried to curtail what I ate. I felt like I was hungry all the time. Not at Mom's; there was plenty to eat and she was always urging me to eat it or allowing me to attempt to cook for myself (the attempts make me cringe to think of them, so I'll leave those out, if you don't mind). So it's a little ironic that the first real warning signs surfaced at a mealtime.

Breakfast time:

I ambled groggily to the table. The air was full of the usual smells that accompany an excellent breakfast in a house with plenty of money: coffee, butter, eggs, toast, bacon, meat- no oatmeal or cold cereal here. Dennis was planted solidly at one end of the table relishing his perfectly basted sunny-side-up eggs. A building contractor, his Mexican laborers were also at the table, eating eggs and chorizo. One of the workers lived nearby, and the other had a little room in the downstairs portion of our home. Mike was sitting right next to Dennis as usual. They called out to me in greeting. Dennis hollered out to my mom:

"Mary, make her some eggs! Hey kiddo, what kind of eggs do you want? Over easy?"

I quickly replied that I couldn't stand runny eggs, and that I'd like the entire eggs fried very thoroughly. He thought sunny side up was best and only real way to eat eggs, but was amiable enough, contenting himself with remarking that he couldn't believe I could possibly like them that way.

So, we were all sitting there munching away on toast with homemade pomegranate jelly, eggs, bacon, and herbal tea, when my brother shrieked and stood up hurridly. We all looked at him. He looked accusingly at Dennis.

Dennis said, "Mike, what are you yelling about? Eat your breakfast."

Mike giggled: "Oh no....I'm not going to.."

After a few more stern admonitions, he did sit down and resumed eating, but within a minute or two, he yelped again and backed away from Dennis, wild eyed and half babbling about Dennis having done "it" again. The Mexicans looked uneasy. I tried to understand what the fuss was about, but it was like a game where everyone but me knew the order of play, so I just watched. Mike was induced to sit (reluctantly) again, but he kept edging as far away from Dennis as he could and giggling and saying,

"Oh no, you're not going to get me this time!"

"I don't know what you're talking about. Quit fooling around and eat your breakfast."

"Oh, yes you do, yes huh!" Mike continued to eye Dennis warily as he ate in a way reminiscent of a scavenger at a carcass, ready to flee again at the slightest warning. Dennis ignored him and started talking in Spanish to George and Valente, the Mexicans. I looked at my mother. Her movements were restless and short, but she hadn't said anything. I started eating again.

Mike screamed!! He jumped up from the table and started yelling. Tears were in his eyes.

"I knew you would do it! I knew you would!!"

"I don't know what you're talking about! I didn't do anything to you. Quit making a scene and sit down here."

"Denny...." My mom said. She was looking at him, spatula in hand, passive.

Mike seized the opportunity to break off and ran crying to his room.

"Mary, I keep telling you, you're going to spoil that boy and he'll turn our just like his father. He needs to learn how to behave at the table."

"Denny....." That was all she said. George and Valente looked down at their plates and ate studiously. I shoveled in the last of my food and left as soon as I could. I couldn't understand what had gone on, but it was unpleasat.

I sought Mike out. He was hiding from Dennis, his face puffy. I asked him.

"He pokes me with toothpicks!" He showed me where the toothpick had broken the skin.

"Why?"

"Because, he likes to! He does it all the time!"

It didn't make sense to me then. And I can't really say that it makes any sense now, either.

Oh, wait. I introduced you to everyone else except for myself. I'm like that. I forget the obvious a lot.

OK, at this time in my life, I'm a 14 year old girl. Wildly unpopular in school, I defiantly try to make my own styles and march to the sound of my own drums, mainly because I don't know how to do otherwise. If I were able to conform, I might...if it made sense to me and seemed logical. So, the result of all this is that I think I'm pretty cool with a short spiked haircut, red eyeshadow, hugely baggy pants, and very loud jewelry. At this point in time, I'm convinced that I'm a talented artist, and I draw constantly and go through reams and reams of paper and wear out a lot of writing implements, often on the same subject, over and over and over again, tryign to refine it down to the essence of what I'm trying to express. I might draw the same cat in the same pose fifty or a hundred times. I also do a lot of abstract art, with intersecting shapes and bright colors. My favorite color is blue. I'd like to have everything I own in blue. I also like to sew and make things. This is the overriding drive in my life -to create- and it's virtually all I think about, other than guys and animals.

I love animals. I can't live without them. People are so mean, and animals, if you know their language, are a lot better and far more trustworthy. When I grow up, I want to have LOTS and LOTS of animals- all kinds, but especially cats. My mom let me have a kitten- Marshmallow. I nicknamed him Mashy. I spend so much time with him (hours a day, basically whenever I'm not drawing or climbing trees or hiking) that he's extremely tame and laidback. I can give him a bath and he'll purr the whole time. He lays back in my arms and lets me pet his tummy, something cats don't usually like. When I want to call the cats to play with them or feed them, I go outside and meow loudly. They come running. Even the very shy ones will let me handle them. It doesn't make sense to me to call them in English. They're cats.

I had a boyfriend in Chicago, and I miss him. His name was Matt...something ending with "ski". He's Polish, so I don't remember his last name, and besides, he was always just "Matt" to me. He's tall, about 6 feet and the same age as me, blond. He has acne, but I don't care...most of them do. Matt is extremely quiet and shy, like me. We hardly ever talk when we're together, just short bits of sentences, but there's so much meaning in the silence when we're together. He never said goodbye, or that he'd miss me....we just knew these things. When I left, we walked to the door holding hands (seemed like a big thing to me at age 14) and he kissed me on the forehead. He used to feel my spiky hair and laugh about it. Darn, I miss him. Maybe I shouldn't have moved here.

But...I don't think my dad likes me anymore. We fight all the time. He wants me to be pretty and preppy and feminine like his new wife, Marie, to play piano like he does (and he's so good that to hear my own bumbling attempts, when I want to sound just like him, is frustrating), and above all, to be "orthodox", whatever that means. I think he means that he wants me to be just like everyone else, and not only do I not know how, I don't want to. Other people are boring and dull! They never seem to think about why they do things or whether there's another way to do them. In short, I don't think my dad likes me the way I am. He didn't want Lisa to go..he likes her. He was fine with my going. Besides, my Mom is fun and it's so great to finally get to be with her.

About God:

My sister and I were raised as Missouri Synod Lutherans. This would be the stricter, more conservative kind of Lutheran. The choir sometimes sang in Latin or German. A descendant of Martin Luther once came to our church. We still did the old formal liturgy and chanting. Personal relationships with God weren't discussed much, that was sort of personal. Knowing the Ten Commandments and the Lutheran catechism was important, as was being confirmed in the Lutheran faith.

I did all that, but God just didn't seem very friendly to me. He was like this ominous father figure way far off who'd see everything did wrong and frown at it, see what you did right and sigh in disappointment that it wasn't better, and if things got really bad really quick, you might ask him for help, but he'd just watch and wait instead.

My dad had frequented more interesting born-again type churches over the years, but he was the church organist and director of music (as well as a teacher in the private Lutheran school we went to), so the Lutheran church was still home base. I'd been reading the little tracts he had boxes of for years- the "Chick tracts", and a lot of my perceptions of God were based on these tracts. He was always depicted as faceless and impossibly large, remote. The converts were always very, very emotional and filled with joy, tears running down their faces. People who didn't convert in time endured unspeakable torment by sadistic demons. The solution to avoiding hell was to say the sinner's prayer, where you ask Jesus into your heart and admit that you're a sinner and you're sorry. I did it several times as a child, but nothing felt different afterwards even though I was quite sincere.

My mother's rendition of God was quite a bit different.....

My mother's vision of God was intensely personal; a friend who forgave all and loved unconditionally and spoke to you on a daily basis whenever you wanted to take the time to listen to him. I think it can be said that people tend to pattern their concept of God after their own personality. How often do you meet a stern, severe,unsmiling person who goes to a happy, hand-clapping church and believes in a joyful God? Thus it was that my dad was a Lutheran and my mom, more of a born-again charismatic type. His god saw what we did and disapproved- every unkind thought or rude action was noted and dutifully written down against you, to be replayed on an overhead screen after your death when you stood before the judgment throne with the big, faceless Father. Her God was a Jesus with long flowing hair and tears of happiness and love running down his face, full of emotion.

My mom described how Jesus had appeared to her once, after she'd seen a seven foot tall demon standing behind my dad. Jesus talked to her all the time. She led her life through his guidance and was prone to stopping what she was doing quite suddenly and taking off to do something entirely different, because she had a feeling that the Lord wanted her to. She didn't usually explain this until after the whole incident was over and done with, leaving the rest of us confused and disoriented in the meantime. Often the Lord warned her of other people plotting against her, or who weren't true Christians, or who might be praying against us or trying to curse us.

We went to her church, which was more of a bible study group held in a room of the pastor's home. Actually, I don't remember them reading the bible veyr much, now that I think of it. The meeting began with prayer (all eyes are closed, all heads are bowed, but I just watched everyone alertly even when the pastor repeated it several times- I was afraid of other people watching me with my eyes shut), then we sang a lot of songs, most of them either very emotional or happy, and testimonials and sharing of troubles or whatever had happened to us, a call for those of us who hadn't been saved yet to give their hearts to the Lord and ask Jesus into their hearts, and more prayer, which again I used to observe the other people.

My mother's superstition had a marked effect on me: even at 14 I was still a child in many ways; I still believed that unicorns were actually prancing around somewhere in some remote, hardly discovered part of the earth, for example. All her talk of demons scared the living daylights out of me, especially since she said that my dad had a whopper following him around. Pretty soon I was dreaming of them and imagining that I saw them, and I was scared. Then there were the constant warnings of Satanists making animal and human sacrifices (this was where all those missing children ended up), and a list of signs to watch for and places where the Satanic rites were being held. One of the places was a favorite hiking place of mine. After she told me I avoided it like the plague. If we fell, we thought we'd been pushed- by a demon. If we glimpsed a shadow from the corner of our eye, that was an evil spirit, hanging around just out of sight, lurking, waiting to get us. Bad thoughts? They weren't ours- Satan had put them there. We were constantly praying desperately for God to rescue us from Satan getting into our heads and making us think mean things.

Without Jesus, what would we do? He was our rock and hiding place from the fiery tongues of evil lapping at us, ready to reach out and grab us up, away into hell if we strayed even the littlest bit.

Running Springs, CA, 1986: Life here is so different from my dad's that I can hardly believe it. First of all, no school! No arguments from me, I hate school and the mean kids there. My mom's going to homeschool us. In the meantime, we pretty much have the run of the place. I explore the forested and rocky areas and quickly develop a knowledge of an area of perhaps a mile- peppering this area with small forts, hiding places, and learning the trails and trees and the best places to go climbing. I don't tell my mom exactly where I go or what exactly, because she worries about really insignificant things. She's forever thinking that I'll get hurt. Other girls don't want to roam around with me, but my brother does, and there are a few other boys who I'll let run around with me- not boyfriends, just hiking buddies. I still miss Matt and write his name in the dirt with sticks.

My mom asks me what I want to learn in school, and of course, about the only thing that interests me is art. When people say that maybe someday I can be an artist, I get sort of mad but try not to let it show. I tell them that I'm already an artist and then they back off and shut their mouths. None of the ones who've said that can draw like I do, so why are they condescending like that? I draw constantly.

Something else I like is sewing and making craft projects. My mom gives me the go-ahead on a box of fabric, and pretty soon I've got oodles of stuffed animals cut out and ready to sew together. I'm thinking of making every animal I can possibly think of, like a Noah's ark but with only one of each animal, not two. I am voraciously creative, and other people's opinions of my work are hardly heard, let alone taken to heart.

The food we eat here is different. We eat a lot of meat, cheese, and fresh fruit. Dennis brings home entire boxes of oranges. In fact, they seem pretty liberal with money in general. If they want something, they buy it right now, and the object doesn't have to be needed very much or even long desired. If they see it and maybe they want it, it's theirs.

The house is always bouncing to the happy sound of Debby Boone, a Christian singer my mom likes. They said that Julian Lennon and Michael Jackson were evil, so I had to break my favorite records and throw them away, because they weren't Christian. I still have some Christian rock (Petra)that Dennis doesn't care for, but it's Christian, so I get to keep it. They never play classical music here or sing old hymns like we did at the Lutheran church. It's always this upbeat modern Christian pop.

Also, Dennis hates for me to talk about or to be interested in boys or men. He's always saying that it's a good thing I didn't stay in Chicago, or I'd probably end up with a chocolate baby. He doesn't like blacks, and he really doesn't like it if I talk like one, which I can do quite convincingly, having mingled with them as friends for years. I think Valente, the Mexican worker, is cute. He has soft, gentle dark eyes and an easy going personality. When Dennis sees that I like him, he tells Valente to leave me alone or he'll cut off his balls. After that, Valente says that he likes me but he's afraid to talk to me anymore.

My mom's cousin Kary came to live with us! He's in his early twenties and a Marine. He's also really short, like not much taller than five feet. Don't be deceived by appearances though: Kary may be little but he's tough, he may have a name like Kary, but he's as macho as they come. He's also a lot of fun. He chews Skoal and swaggers around and cusses when he wants to and tells funny stories and clearly doesn't think Dennis is the last word. Mike and I think Kary's the greatest, and the next best thing to an older brother.

Dennis also has two married daughters, Michelle and Renee. They're both pretty typical blond California girls who place a lot of emphasis on clothing, wear lots of makeup, act superficial and loose, and pretend that they're even dumber than they actually are. Michelle's husband Sam seems decent. He's a big, muscular, laid back guy, with a Golden Retriever personality. It's Michelle I can't stand. She's sharp tongued and arbitrarily vicious based on her opinions, which of course are founded on her skinny little brains or the air cells in between.

Renee is another story. She's sort of a broken person. When she was a couple years younger (she's 16 at this time) she and her boyfriend (also named Matt) were driving somewhere Dennis had ordered them not to go. They got hit by a drunk driver, she was horribly injured, and her boyfriend, who was really a good guy according to all accounts (even Dennis) died. She hasn't ever gotten over it, because he was the one she was supposed to marry, the one God had picked out for her, and now she'll never have the right husband, no matter what she does. Renee seems selfish, overly exuberant, and flirtatious with any male in sight, but underlying all this is a deep sadness. Her gaiety is so loud because it's insincere and forced. Her husband, Joe, is a jerk and he leaves bruises on her face. Dennis hates him, but has the firm opinion that God punished her by taking Matt away because she disobeyed her father.

At Dennis's insistence, I gave my heart to Jesus once again. I'm still not sure why the first several times weren't enough. The reasons I did it were that A. I was terrified of the demons, or the idea of them, and B. These Christians believed in the "rapture", wherein a heavenly trumpet sounds, and all the Christians on earth suddenly vanish and are raptured up to heaven. If you haven't been saved by then, things are going to be really, really bad, because once all the Christians are with Jesus, He lets a lot of really awful things happen to the world. The idea of being left all alone, with no family, right when all hell was about to break loose, was terrifying.

I should add here that from the time I was a child, we believed that we would see the end times, the last days, the mark of the beast...all the things written in Revelations would come to pass in our lifetime, and quite possibly before we reached adulthood. We were constantly alert for the signs spoken of in Revelations.

Now that I was saved, it wasn't enough. I had to (they said) tell everyone I met to become a Christian if they didn't want to go to hell. We needed to save the world, because the end was at hand. There was a terribly heavy weight of responsibility...a person's eternal life could hinge on whether I was able to breach my social anxieties and convince them to give their heart to God.

Dennis was a complicated person. He's one of those sorts who are keenly intelligent, and as you get to know them the thought occurs to you that perhaps both he and the world at large would be better off if his I.Q. were closer to 80 than 140. For there is no doubt in my mind that he was frighteningly bright, but at the same time, I can't especially say that it really benefitted him or anyone he came into contact with. His was more than a wasted gift, it was a misused one. If he hadn't had a natural knack for malice, deceit, and sadism, perhaps matters might have been different.

My inital impression of him had been that he seemed like a big teddy bear (oh, what a fool a 13 year old kid can be!). After just a few weeks I realized that I had grossly underestimated the man. Naturally socially avoidant anyway, I began to circumvent him when possible. He was full of mixed messages: he might smile and laugh when you were done for, or look serious and forbidding when you weren't in trouble at all. Above all, he was unpredictable.

Between my mother's superstitions and penchant for drama and Dennis's suspicious rooting around for satanism, conspiracies, and hidden truths, life with them was almost akin to a comedy movie that looks funny at first, but gradually turns tragic.
"The end is near", "Flee unto the mountains", "Come out of her, my people"....these passages from the scriptures were taken very seriously, and we began to ponder what they might mean for us personally, because it certainly seemed like we were entirely too comfortable here in the Sam Bernadino mountains.

God's answer grew clearer to us by the day. The sight of Dennis and my mom kneeling beside their bed praying fervently became almost as frequent as their hints and comments about a place i'd never seen, thought of, or been to before: Idaho. Idaho was like Lake Tahoe before it was discovered (what was Lake Tahoe? I didn't know. Someplace nice, apparently). Idaho was a wilderness with bears and cougars and elk and moose and deer running wild everywhere, with wolves and coyotes and caribou and mountain goats and bighorn sheep and real eagles flying in the sky, not in a cage, like the only eagles I'd ever seen before at a zoo. There were Canada geese, wild ducks, grouse...and according to my mom and Dennis, many of these animals were edible, which was a revelation to me.

"Deer meat? Gross! I'm never going to eat deer meat!"

My mom laughed easily..."Oh, you'll like it. It's good!"

I made a face, unconvinced.

"In Idaho," she continued, "there are lots of trees!"

"There are lots of trees here", I said.

"Oh, you haven't seen trees like they have in Idaho. There they have forests of trees."

"Well, when I get there, I'm going to run through the trees!" I was getting excited at the thought of a raw, untamed wilderness to explore.

My mom started laughing hysterically and saying that I could never run in the trees there, they were too thick. My pride hurt, I silently vowed that I would.

She told us about here friends up there that they'd met in the Idaho panhandle. Randy and Vicky Weaver were so neat! They lived on top of a mountain and were true country folks. They homeschooled their kids, too. We'd like them a lot. Bonnie and Lowell had horses and a big farm, Dennis had known them for years, and Renee had lived with them for a time. John and Jan, the pastor and his wife, truly good people... Idaho sounded like a wholesome, exciting place to be. There was a definite Little House on the Prairie aura to the whole thing.

She watched a movie about the Wilderness family or some thing, with people who crash land in Alaska and make friends with the grizzly bears, and said that Idaho was like that. Dennis talked a lot about Alaska, too. Idaho was great, but maybe Alaska.....

Somehow, moving to Idaho had imperceptibly gone from being a fantasy to a sure thing. The Lord was leading us to move there.

I think I've mentioned the sort of families we came from, but I'd like to touch on it again before I continue, because if you can keep this in mind, the rest of the story will make a little more sense. Simply put, we were people of a middle class or even upper class background. Dennis's family had been quite wealthy, an old family with royaly in their ancestry. My father's family was also very well bred and rather privileged, of German (his mother's side) and English/Welsh stock. We ate formal dinners for holidays, and even the daily dinners were formal compared to other people and what we would find in Idaho. We were full of manners and habits, expectations and pride that can only be explained in this context. There's also a certain rudeness that comes with this background, a sense of entitlement, of condecension. If you're eating at a nice restaurant and make a horrific mess, or sing loudly, or behave as you wouldn't at home, what of it? Someone else will clean up the mess, you're paying handsomely to be there, and you'll probably not see them again anyway. We routinely did exactly this sort of thing.

In short, excepting Dennis's workers (he was a contractor) and the children I'd gone to school with, we had little to no experience with the working class, no sympathy with them or understanding of them. In our eyes, they were inferior and their way of life, slightly or outright disgusting. And now I can see just how inauspicious our move to Idaho really was; but then we were starry eyed and blissfully ignorant of the road ahead.

The Lord's will was clear to us now: we were to flee unto the mountains of Idaho, away from "Egypt" (California). My mom might be able to continue selling her handmade crafts there, and while Dennis didn't have any job prospects as yet, he did have plenty of skills, and our god was Jehovah Jireh (God the provider). We weren't even sure where we'd live, but since Dennis had so many friends and connections up there, it shouldn't be a problem.

From my point of view, while I was optimistic about the idea of moving to a rustic, unspoiled area, I was also worried about the animals (with whom I had a closer bond than with people). We had four cats, including my beloved Mashy, and a Border Collie, Sheba. Dennis was in favor of leaving them all behind, which of course resulted in hysterics on my part and helpless pleading from Mom. Renee and Michelle would be staying, Kary would come along for the adventure. We packed and we packed....it took a long time and some help from U-haul to make the move. Dennis sold one of his trucks and kept the tan crew cab and the blue Chrysler.

In the end, Dennis dropped off all the cats at a trailer park for retired people. I can only hope that Mashy's warm and loving nature endeared him to someone who appreciated him. The others were less tame to other people although I could handle them all easily. He tried to leave Sheba at my mom's brother's house, but she was so frantic in our absence that she tore up everything a dog could possily tear up: window shades included. This was not normal behavior for her, and Pete wanted nothing to do with her after that. We could only conclude that she was meant to accompany us after all. We visited with the family members we had in California, and then we were ready to roll.

We drove for a long, long time, for what seemed like forever. Mike and I sat with Kary when we could- he was more fun. We played twenty questions and talked with Mom and Denis using the walkie talkies. From time to time we were amused to see Dennis's hand flopping out the window, the cold air flowing over his hand being his way of staying awake. We saw Mt. Shasta. Finally, we stopped to rest and breakfast at a very nice pancake house.

As we perused the menus, I noticed Lisa and Mike giggling and whispering, but the menu was so tempting that I was more engaged in choosing. The waiter arrived and politely asked us what we'd like. I looked up just in time to see Mike and Lisa simultaneously make "monster faces" (two fingers inserted on each side of the mouth, exposing most of one's teeth gnashing in the air) at the waiter! He hurriedly excused himself and vanished, not to be seen again while we were there. This was too funny! A waitress arrived, and they gave her the monster faces too, but she was more stalwart and bore it well (in the background we could hear other waiters trying hard not to bust a gut laughing). Every single time (against Mom's protests) the waitress came around, she got a faceful of teeth from both children!

And then, we were on the road again, fortified with the memory of the male waiter's face frozen in horror, stuttering wordlessly just before he disappeared. He had been so formal that it really was funny to see him lose his composure.

The first thing I remember of Idaho is stopping in Sandpoint. It seemed like a quiet, sleepy little timber town. The visitor center had a long log laid down as a border for the parking area, and we competed to see who could walk on it the farthest without losing their balanace. Not much was outside of Sandpoint past there. We drove through Elmira (such a tiny town it was hardly worth mentioning or posting a sign for) and found ourselves in what they called the town of Deep Creek. To me it just looked like a string of cheap motel-type cabins and a restaurant. The people here talked funny. They didn't call it "Deep Creek", it was "Dip Crick". All around were dark green forests, with the creek in the full rush of spring. The date was March 22nd, 1987.

Dennis had a lot of connections in the Deep Creek/Naples/Bonners Ferry areas. One of these connections owned the little string of motels and we moved into one of these motel rooms. We all crammed into one unit- three adults and four children. There were two beds, a bathroom, and possibly a small fridge. There was absolutely no privacy, so Kary and Mike and I wound up spending a good deal of time outdoors. Mom had gone on and on about how many garnets were on Idaho, and how one could find them simply lying on the ground, but also in creeks. Dennis had brought gold pans and boasted of how rich he would become, because he had secret methods for finding the gold. So you can imagine how optimistically we viewed the creek running past the door of our motel room! Garnets, there for the picking! Gold to be panned! If we found it, it would be ours to keep! We ran down to the edge of the creek and picked through all the pebbles and small stones we could reach. Any glittering fleck was gold or silver. Soon I got caught up in the beauty of the various rocks and forgot about the garnets, silver, and gold. They were beautiful in their own right. This might sound silly to a native Idahoan or other country dweller, but I had come from the concrete jungle of Chicago. I had never picked through the stones by a creek like this. I selected piles and piles of them and laid them on newspaper outside the door of the motel room. My siblings did the same, and pretty soon we were bickering over whose rocks were whose. Whenever there was an empty jar, I rinsed it out, filled it with rocks, and added water, because they were more colorful wet than dry.

Kary took me out to the fields nearby and decided it was time for me to learn how to play catch. At first I ran in terror when the baseball came hurtling in my direction. In Chicago, it had been dodgeball, and balls were weapons to be thrown forcefully at a victim's face. Kary was patient. He showed me how to use the glove, to meet the ball even as something in me was screaming to get out of the way, quick. After hours of this, we threw and caught the ball, back and forth, happily. Kary was good company, because he didn't talk too much, but had a quiet, strong presence. Even when he was in a bad mood, you knew he'd be there for you if you really needed him.

Kary took off a lot, hiking through the woods without us. Mike and I built forts together in the remains of a huge burn pile. There was a guy there named Tommy John who seemed always to be burning something. The pile was full of pliable, half burnt wire that was easy to use for binding sticks and boards together. Tommy John hardly spoke to us; mostly he concentrated on the burn pile. Another kid our age frequented the burn piles. He had a fascination with trains. A freight train ran past the burn pile several times a day, and he always knew roughly when it would be passing through and was there to see it.

In the motel room was a lot of squabbling and raw nerves. I was oblivious to quite a bit of it, except that our eating fare was extremely limited. We ate mostly ramen noodle soup made with hot water from the bathroom tap. My mom and Dennis shared one of the beds, my sisters the other. Kary, Mike and I slept in sleeping bags on the floor. I could have shared the bed, but preferred the personal space of the floor to a bed full of flailing limbs.

Dennis was frequently gone, once to a place that sounded like "Quarterlane", but I later learned was Couer d'Alene. They were looking for something, arguing about stuff, and I wasn't sure what, but suspected that they were seeking more permanent, roomy living quarters than the motel.

After settling in at the motel for several days, we began to make forays into the local community of Dennis's friends.

The first people I remember meeting were Randy and Vicky Weaver. One thing I noticed right away about Idaho was that peole tended to drop their last names. Even children weren't much expected to call adults by "Mr and Mrs Smith". Instead, you were to call them "Bill and Barb". North Idaho was quite a bit more casual socially than other places we'd been. We drove up an alarmingly narrow winding dirt road that looked as if we were in grave danger of falling off the edge and down the side of the mountain. The road was awfully muddy and rutted, unlike any road I'd ever been on before. I would soon learn that the road was fairly unremarkable, and that the correct term for "spring" in north Idaho was "mud season". After what seemed like half an hour, we crested a hill and saw a small cabin.

Mom introduced us. Vicky Weaver had long dark hair falling to her waist and wore a denim skirt. She was tall and thin, quiet and thoughtful. Randy had a beard, and he wasn't a big man. He and Dennis talked quite a bit, and he took Dennis around the place to show what he'd made since they'd last seen one another. There were three children: Sarah, Rachel, and Samuel. The girls had long brown hair and denim skirts like their mom. Sam was dressed quite a bit like Mike- jeans and a flannel shirt. All the children were extremely composed and well behaved. At first they thought I was a boy, due to my short spiked hair and blue jeans (I was so chagrined by this that I vowed to grow my hair out again as sson as possible), and I have to say that our behavior must have been rather alarming to them. They all seemed much more mature, even though I was older than Sarah, the eldest. She acted like a grown woman. She already held a job as a waitress in the restaurant at Deep Creek, and rode a large speckled gray horse -bareback, in her denim skirt- to get there. She spoke very calmly and seemed unflappable. She wore a pistol on the belt around the waist of her skirt. We learned that this was because there were bears and other predators in the area that they might need to defend themselves from. She knew how to use it, and judging her demeanor, was no doubt very responsible with it. We were green with envy and disbelief...a gun! A job! Riding a horse all that way, alone and bareback! And she wasn't even 14 yet!

Mike and Sam were off running around exploring. Sarah continued to give us a tour of the place. They had no bathroom and used an outhouse. They had no refrigerator, using some sort of an ice box or cooler instead. In fact, they didn't have any electricity at all! The sink had a hand pump for a faucet. The house itself was rustic by design, but lovingly decorated with Vicky's hand braided rugs, quilts, and so on. Her favorite color was the same as mine- a deep cobalt blue. She had a stunning set of blue glass dishes. The home was heated with wood. Sarah showed us their bedrooms. The upstairs portion of the cabin was partitioned off with blankets. The parent's bedroom had a regular bed and a small cot. The cot was for when Vicky had her period, because Yahweh didn't want women to have sex during their periods, and there would be less temptation if she slept on the cot.

Sarah educated us as she walked around the place. The children were homeschooled just as we were. I asked her why she kept calling the Lord "Yahweh", because even though I was familiar with the name, I had never heard anyone use it so much, or exclusively as they did. She explained that "lord" and "God" were titles with pagan origins, and that His correct name was Yahweh. "Jesus" was also incorrect, the proper Hebrew name was "Yahshua". The family didn't eat pork, rabbit, or other unclean meats. They observed the 7th day Sabbath and did no work at all on the Sabbath. She liked art, too, but couldn't draw animals, because the scriptures forbade the making of images. Geometrical patterns and quilt designs were safe, though.

In the background, Dennis and Randy talked about the end times approaching. Vicky was telling my mom how she'd given birth to all her children at home, and how each of them had been born on a feast day or high Sabbath (along with the 7th day Sabbaths, they observed the biblical week long feast days, on either end of which is a high Sabbath).

We played Monopoly, and after dinner, we washed the dishes with water heated on the wood stove. Kerosene lamps cast a cozy golden glow over the cabin. As we left our newfound friends (with much waving and hoping to see one another again sometime soon) the awareness was bright in us, that we had seen a new window on life, that we were favorably inspired to live as they did. They were real country people, and we wanted to be like them.

The first church we went to was The Bonner's Ferry Assembly of God. It was very similar in belief to the church we'd been going to rior to leaving California. We sang happy songs, praised the Lord loudly while others prayed, waved our hands in the air, and felt the Holy Spirit moving among us. If someone was sick, they were coaxed to the front of the church and people with the gift of healing would lay hands on them and pray for Jesus to heal them. Almost every Sunday, someone either gave their heart to the Lord or rededicated their life to Him by kneeling at the front of the church and praying with the pastor. There was a lot of speaking in tongues (which, if you haven't heard it before, sounds like emotionally charged gibberish), a lot of prophesying. It was a very charismatic, New Testament church.

The pastor was John White, and our parent's friend, along with his wife Jan. John and Jan were really nice people. My mom told us how they'd lost one of their two sons in a car accident. That was sad. John and his remaining son were both accomplished hunters and fisherman.

Bonners Ferry was quite a bit bigger than either Deep Creek or Naples (another small town). They had a regular grocery store, a variety store, the Pink Lion, and a laundromat where we washed our clothes. The best part about the laundromat was being able to run over to the Pink Lion and look at what they had there. There was a store called the Black Sheep, that my mom seemed to think was just the greatest store in the world. I'm not sure, because to be honest, I never got to see. Times were tight now. We didn't get something as soon as we wanted it anymore, and we didn't eat strictly whatever we felt like eating. One night, my mom made clam chowder (yuck! Seafood!) and I was hungry enough that I actually have pleasant memories of eating it. More often than not, the fare was ramen noodle soup or other canned goods. Not only were we short on money, we had no way to cook food other than a Coleman camp stove that Dennis had set up in a makeshift cooking area in the motel room. And they were still unsuccessfully searching far and wide for a place to live.

My hair started to grow out a little, and I made the mistake of letting my sister Lisa cut it for me. The sides and back were growing long, but she cut the top ridiculously short. It was bad enough that people thought I was a boy (they apparently hadn't encountered girls with short hair), now I looked like a stupid boy. I still wore the city slicker clothing that I'd had in Chicago...there was nothing else to wear.

That is what I looked like when we met Bonnie and Lowell Carlson. I had a stupid haircut, blue jeans, and big city mannerisms. We drove out to a place....but in all seriousness, it looked like just a firepit, a barn, and a silo to me. They were working on a house there, and it wans't built yet. People were sitting around the firepit eating. Lowell had gray and white hair, longish for a man, and his face was weathered and friendly, eyes crinkled in behind his glasses. He exuded friendliness. Bonnie had shoulder length dark hair, was quieter, and also wore glasses. Their foster son George was there. He was 16, with blond hair and blue eyes gleaming with mischief. He was about the same height as me, short, which made me like him almost immediately. He had a plumpish brown-haired girlfriend that I was already jealous of. After the routine of greetings and introductions, we sat down with them, and I was appalled to discover that what they were eating was goat ribs! Could people actually eat goats? It seemed positively barbaric. What kind of people were these? They held some out to me, but I made my disgust tactlessly clear and emphatic. Then they offered us some pasta. It was spaghetti...sort of. The noodles were broken up and thinly covered with something red and sticky, which was probably plain tomato paste. I could not conceieve of anyone doing this to spaghetti! I ate it though, and marvelled at the people in this area and the odd things that they cooked and called food.

I was relieved when George came by and wanted to show us around the place. The silo: it was being made into a bedroom for George! I had no idea that people could live in silos. I looked up. There was a center post with rafters radiating to the sides of the silo above us. Fascinating. Outside the barn: cages of hardware cloth, full of small velvety-brown ducklings. I didn't know ducklings could be brown, I thought they were always yellow. There was a dead duckling in the cage, and it was crowded in there. The other ducklings ran around on top of the dead one, and that bothered me. There were 6 or 7 more dead ducklings set on top of the cage. I didn't understand that. First of all, why did they die, and secondly, why were they all laid there on top of the cage? The inside of the barn: goats. I was afraid of the goats, so I kept my distance. I had seen all too many story book pictures of children getting knocked down by a nasty goat with wicked looking horns. A corral behind the barn: it held a huge gray Percheron draft horse, Prince. He was massive. I don't think I'd ever seen such a large orse before. George boasted that he could leap onto Prince's back and ride him without a saddle. I couldn't see how... Another horse: this one, Lady, was considerably smaller. George said we could ride her, and encouraged us to stand on a fence. All four of us climbed on, with difficulty. We clung to one another. He walked us around slowly. It was very hard to maintain our balance on the slippery, swaying horse. One of us leaned slightly, slipped a little, and plunk! we all landed on the ground, in the dirt. We got back on, each hotly accusing the other of making us fall off. George seemed to think we were the most amusing sight he'd seen in some time. My eyes began to itch. I sneezed. My eyes started watering. They swelled up. I couldn't see. I could hardly breathe. My entire face was puffy and I sneezed uncontrollably. I could hardly make my way to the truck, where I curled up in disgrace. I was allergic, very allergic, to the horses. The disliked girlfirend peered in at me in the truck and expressed her sympathy. I hated her. I hated being allergic. I had wanted so badly to ride the horses by myself, without a bunch of sisters hanging on me, pulling me down. Instead, I had to hide my awful, running face in the truck, while everyone else visited and kept riding the horses.

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

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

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

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

Since we were officially country people now, we decided we had to live like country people. This primarily involved the aqcuisition of livestock.

Bonnie and Lowell let us borrow or board two horses; Lady and Sugar. Sugar was an ancient, worn out Welsh mare. Her shaggy, dingy white coat was ragged and worn thin around the saddle area. However, being posessed of an exceptionally patient, long suffering temperament, she was well suited to a family of children who knew nothing at all about horses. Lady was bigger and probably some kind of Quarter horse cross. She was tan with a striped black and white mane. She may have had some Appaloosa or Pinto ancestry. Compared to Sugar, Lady looked like a prize steed, but she was also less tolerant of our treatment of her. In retrospect, I can see that both of them were bombproof old mares that could have been trusted with a three year old...but at the time, we viewed them as very adventuresome, and ourselves as quite brave and rustic when we were able to climb from a fence or platform onto their backs and stay there while the horse walked around calmly, without falling off. We had no saddles, so we rode bareback. It was some time before we were even able to put the bridles on them, and we frequently just clipped leads to Sugar's halter and hauled and heaved on them. We knew absolutely nothing about neck-reining or leg pressure. Our main objective was to stay aboard the horse and if we were lucky, to induce it to keep moving along and maybe even in a direction of our choice.

George was there to tutor us, and derived much mirth from our awkward attempts. He would sit watching us from the tall, majestic white Appaloosa gelding he rode (Pawnee), and then suddenly kick his mount into a wild gallop across the hay field while we looked on enviously.

What I really wanted was another cat. I was still upset about Mashy. Lowell had a lot of feral barn cats and said I was welcome to as many cats as I wanted, if I could catch them. They eluded me in the cracks between the hale bales....tons and tons of hay....I gave it my best shot but they were faster and very shy.

Bonnie and Lowell gave us four of the little brown ducklings, one for each child. How perky and soft they were! My mother said they were a rare breed (actually, they were Khaki Campbells, I know now) and very precious, an incredible gift. I thought back to the ducklings dead in and on the cage at the ranch and wondered why anyone would let such precious ducklings die like that. Ducks swim, right? We filled up the big utility sink with water and laughed with glee while the baby ducks paddled around in it. After a while, they started sinking in the water and seeming to drown. We took them out, but it was too late. They all died. We didn't know that new ducklings don't have oil on their feathers, to protect them from the water and help them float. We didn't know that ducklings need to have food in front of them constantly and that they really need a heat lamp so they don't get cold. Noone told us these things. Until they died, they were just novel, living toys for our amusement. It hurt to see them die, casualties of our (well intended) fun.

One day I looked out to see several family members looking into the holding pen by the dairy barn. Kary, Mike, George and Dennis were there. I ran out to see. There was an adorable little white and black goat kid running around, a gift from Bonnie and Lowell. They let him out of the pen. Immediately, he ran right up to me, his short little tail wagging eagerly.
"Look! He loves me! He loves me!" I cried.
Kary snorted; "He loves everyone."
George christened our new arrival "Cisco", for the Cisco kid.
Cisco wanted a bottle. Mike got to feed him. He sucked vigorously at the bottle and only butted it a tiny bit. I was afraid of most goats, but Cisco was so small and beguiling that he was the exception. We were terrified that the coyotes would eat him at night, so we shut him up in the silo every evening. During the day, we tethered him out. He had to have a bottle 2-3 times a day, and if George didn't brign it by, we went to get it from Bonnie and Lowell's. Lisa and Mike took on the chores associated with Cisco, feeding him, walking him around, tying him out, playing with him.

As for me, I was becoming horse crazy. It wasn't long before I was glued to the backs of those horses like a tick. From some odd reason, Dennis assigned me the task of cleaning not only the barn, but also going around the horse pen with a shovel and wheelbarrow and cleaning up any manure there, depositing it in our mother's compost pile. I have to do this before I could ride them in the morning, so I arose earliest, cleaned the pen, and then rode around the pen (we weren't allowed to ride in the pastures or hayfields) to my heart's delight, before any of the others awoke and demanded a turn.

We were all pretty silly about manure. To us, it was POOP, and treated with the very same disgust accorded to human feces. If we happened to step in it, we grimaced in dismay and quickly cleaned it off our shoes. George found this hilarious. One day we were in the field when a clod of horse manure came sailing through the air and hit me. "Ewww!! Gross!" I shook it off my clothes and felt defiled. He laughed at me, but what could I do? He threw another, and this time it hit me in the FACE. Oh, I was so mad that I forgot about it being dirty and disgusting. I picked up the nearest piece of horse crap and hit him with it. Pretty soon we were in an all-out pucky fight. I needed a bath afterwards, but I was never squeamish about manure again.

(footnote) In case you're wondering, I did have several more allergic outbreaks with the horses, but with exposure, they subsided and finally went away completely.

All this time, we hadn't told any of my father's family that we had moved. I'm sure they wondered where we were. Being the clueless sort of person I really was, I decided to write a letter to my beloved uncle Charlie and get back in touch with him, because I was truly beginning to miss my old family. Idaho was great, he animals were great, our newfound relationship with Jesus was fantastic, but things with my Mom and Dennis weren't all they were cracked up to be. My mom was supposed to be on thyroid medicine, but, convinced that the Lord had healed her of that, she quit taking it before the move. Maybe that could explain part of her increasing mood swings and what I can only describe fairly as paranoia.
Example:

Like me, George had a penchant for drawing. He brought over almost all of his art one day to show me (much of it was pretty good) and he forgot to take it back home with him. Big mistake. My mom and Dennis, convinced that George was "possessed" decided to have a look at George's work. Some of it they didn't like...they declared it to be inspired by Satan, and they burned it in the sink. I watched them wash the ashes of a good portrait of George's sister down the drain while they stood by self-righteously. My heart contracted in my chest, wondering how in the hell I was going to explain what had happened to his cherished masterpieces. They burnt about half of his work and had absolutely no qualms or twinges of regret in doing so.

I became secretive, as Dennis became more and more intrusive. He accused George of trying to get into my pants (never came close, however much I would have liked that) and they made all kinds of outlandish accusations about my dad's side of the family. Nothing, it seemed, was safe from his prying eye or mind, and I began to write my diary in the code I had developed in 7th grade. My art took on a lot of symbolism. He tried in vain to decipher it, while I sneered at him inwardly. We had become enemies, and Dennis was a very uncomfortable enemy to have. I started hiding behind large trees or building when he was around, becoming invisible, avoiding him whenever possible- and denying doing so, because then he'd demand to know what I was up to, what dastardly activity I was concealing from him. I built a lot of forts and huts- some of them on the neighbor's land (the notion of private property hadn't yet sunk into my thick skull).

Charlie wrote me back. He thanked me for "trusting him" enough to tell him where we were, and allowed that the entire family had been concerned about us, and asked me to keep in touch. I didn't see it as a matter of trust (it was a given for me that I trusted my uncle, probably my favorite person in the world at the time)...I just missed them all but was too proud to outright admit it, not after they'd told me that I'd see how rotten my Mom and Dennis would turn out to be. And honestly, if they hadn't done that, I think I would have turned around right then and flown back east, in a heartbeat.

Dennis still wasn't working. Finances and sources of income weren't discussed with the children, but it was plain to us that things were getting tight. We started receiving donations of food from the church. At first, they gave us some venison and elk meat. I wasn't keen on either one. They both had a gamey taste. A neighbor with dairy cattle and draft horses (I think they were Percherons) sold us fresh milk in big glass gallon jars. We were supposed to return the jars, as I know now from the farmer's names on the lids and having sold milk myself, but my mother kept them and used them to store and display dry goods such as beans and flour and rice.

Arthur and Caroline, an older Jewish couple who lived near the Weavers, generously gifted us with a LOT of food, including five gallons of honey, some granola, dried fruit, sorghum, and several bars of Caroline's own homemade soap. I'm ashamed to say that we thought her homemade soap was "strange" and "looked funny" because it wasn't storebought. We were so incredibly ignorant of country life that we didn't even have enough sense to appreciate the magnitude of the gift we'd received from these people.

They also included some white liquid in a recycled brown prune juice bottle. I couldn't understand anyone reusing a prune juice bottle. It looked icky before I even knew what it was. My mother declared that it was goat's milk, and very good. That was enough for me to decide that I didn't want anything to do with it, but Denis, seeing our reluctance, forced us to pour some onto our granola. Then we had to sit down and eat it all in front of him, to make sure we didn't waste any. Well, that milk was one of the worst things I've ever had to put into my mouth. It tasted exactly like a buck goat smelled, as though a buck in rut had swished his dirty, smelly beard in the bucket of milk. We made faces and protested, in vain. Denis insisted that we had to eat all the granola and milk. We gagged, we sputtered and groaned. Mike let it dribble down his face. But it was to no avail, we were forced to eat it all while Denis sat with crossed arms, glaring at us, growling at our pleas and complaints.

It was determined that a garden would be a good idea, to help provide food for the family. The garden site was already fenced and had been cultivated. Mom came out and looked at it, and decided that she was ready to plant it- almost. First, we would have to hoe all the weeds. We weren't happy about this, of course, but it had to be done...so we spent hours hoeing the weeds out, and exposing the soil underneath to the sky. We were pretty relieved when we'd finally turned it all. A week or two went by, but no garden was planted. The soil we'd turned had exposed dormant weed seeds to the warmth of the sun, which germinated gleefully. Mom came out, looked at it, declared we hadn't done our job well enough. There were still weeds! We would have to hoe it all again, until no more weeds came up. I know now that this was nearly impossible. At the time, it just seemed like the most acutely frustrating exercise on earth. We quickly developed an aversion to gardening.

The garden never got planted, so there were no vegetables. Mom turned her focus to the plentiful countryside. Rosehips grew everywhere and were fantastically expensive! We must find and harvest some, maybe we could even sell them! George took us out to look for them. We finally located a rose bush in bloom, and he showed us the hip. It was teeny and green, a small rounded growth beneath the sepals of the flower. It looked nothing at all like the red rosehips Mom used in her tea. We shrugged, threw it away, and trotted off to build forts and climb trees. Next, it was lamb's quarters. These were the common weeds that grew all around the house and in the failed garden. We ate them as salad. As food became less varied, we ate lamb's quarter salads almost every day. She got alfalfa seeds and starting growing alfalfa sprouts, three jars in three stages of development, so that we never ran out of them.
We weren't as short on food as we thought, but we were used to having whatever we wanted to eat, more or less. We didn't know much about cooking beans or whole grains. We didn't know how to make bread from scratch, or about brown rice, or making cream soups with the fresh milk and the lamb's quarters. We didn't know that we could cook the lamb's quarters and use them like spinach. We didn't know that it wasn't the end of the world if we didn't have eggs and meat and potatoes at breakfast with our hot cereal. We weren't used to eating what I could now call plain food, basic food.

So we felt like our lives had been saved when John White called Dennis one night. A 2 year old moose had charged a train (the moose lost) and we could have some of the meat if Dennis would come and help with it, which he did. It had to be processed right away. John, Dennis, and two other men butchered the moose and split it, with each man taking home a fourth of it. We got a hindquarter. That hindquarter filled up an entire freezer. I was dubious about moosemeat, since venison, elk, and goat (which I hadn't actually tasted) hadn't impressed me much, but we were in for a surprise. Moosemeat is excellent! It is better than beef, with a rich, full flavor. Mooseburgers became a family favorite for dinner, topped off with alfalfa sprouts. We thought we were such rugged, rustic country people.

Meanwhile, religion was quickly taking the center stage in our lives. Dennis decided that the word "Amen" was based on the Egyptian god "Amen Ra", and that ending dinner prayers with the word "Amen", meant that we were consecrating the meal to Amen Ra. He and mom fought loudly about this over the meals. He was tending more and more to agree with Randy Weaver about using the name "Yahweh" instead of the title, "Lord". We stayed home from church more and more and worshipped at home. Dennis would read from Isaiah, Malachi, and other dire sounding books, and play Messianic Jewish records. There was discussion about discontinuing the consumption of pork and other "unclean" foods. There was talk of Sabbath, and of Easter being a pagan holiday. There were a lot of fights about these things. Mom said it was legalistic and that God looks at our hearts. Dennis said it was idolatry to worship using the wrong names and to celebrate pagan holidays under the guise of Christianity.

As for me, I was becoming depressed. Life under Dennis's regime was oppressive. I was sick of hearing how my dad's family was evil. I missed them, I missed my dad's organ music, I missed my Uncle Charlie. I wanted to go back, but one condition of going to live with my mom was that it was my only chance. I could go back, but if I did, he wouldn't let me return to see my mom again. Having spent virtually my entire life away from her, I was reluctant to consent to such a drastic aggreement. I didn't tell them I wanted to go back...I just said that I missed it sometimes. My mom became worried that I'd want to leave. She wanted to know why I was silent, why I was sad, what she could do. Finally, they decided that I would be allowed to listen to the music of Keith Green, a Christian artist that my dad had played the entire time we'd lived with him. It was a small thing, but very comforting. Dennis hated Keith Green specifically because my dad liked the music, but he grudgingly made this exception. I also turned inward, towards my art, towards writing in code. I started drawing things differently. Instead of drawing things whole, I fractured them like puzzle pieces.Between the pieces, I put black or white margins, depending on the color of the subject. It it was a black horse or dog, the margins would have to be white to contrast, and vice versa. I started drawing most things fractured like that, as though the world were made of fragile stained glass.

Kary wasn't keen on the direction our life was taking. Never spiritually oriented to begin with, he must have been uncomfortable with our almost constant focus on God and the end times, our discussions of worst case scenarios with the USSR nuking the U.S., and of how our own government would hunt us down and try to kill us for being Christians.

I myself had doubts, though I knew better than to voice them, and my head teemed with questions, trying desperately to reconcile the contradictions I saw. If Dennis was so spiritual, why was he such a jerk? Randy Weaver was the head of his household, but he seemed nicer. We never saw him yell at his kids, and they didn't seem at all afraid of him. So why was Dennis' word always the last word, as if dropped from God's mouth straight into his? Why, when we went to the Assembly of God in Bonners Ferry, did the people wave their hands around, close their eyes as if in ecstasy, and say that they could feel the Holy Spirit? I felt nothing but awkward. I felt no ecstasy, I couldn't get into the whole hand waving thing, the moaning and emotional cries of "yes Lord! Sweet Jesus!" just made me uncomfortable. (In fact, in retrospect, the whole thing seems like a sorry substitue for sex, right down to the sounds. Yeah, it's sacrilege, so what. I said it.) People would collapse suddenly- "slain in the spirit". They spoke quickly and loudly in what sounded like so much repetitive gibberish to me, "speaking in tongues". My mother and sister spoke in tongues, and they urged me to. It was supposed to just flow, to be imspired of the Holy Spirit. I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. I didn't want to try making something up... I wondered why God hadn't given me this gift.

Kary never went to church with us, and I could see why. He did other stuff with us, though. He taught us all how to fire a .22 rifle. First he drilled us severely on gun safety. After what seemed like hours of that, he took us out to the old chicken coop, put a target on it, and walked us through aiming, pulling the trigger. Although I worshipped Kary and wanted to emulate him in every way possible, I realized quite suddenly as the rifle was placed in my hands, that I did not want to fire a gun. It was loud. It killed things. It could kill people. I was frankly afraid of it. Finally I tried to hit the target. It didn't kick like I was afraid it might. We all took turns. By the end of the session, I'd actually put several holes in the target. We felt a little closer to being equal to the Weaver kids, who routinely ran around with pistols on their belts.

One morning, Kary came to breakfast with a girl we had never seen before. She was full bodied and smiling. Mom offered her some tea, and the girl asked for Red Zinger. I sat and watched the tea flush sensuously into the hot water until the entire cup was glowing red. I was faintly shocked that Kary would have sex with a girl he wasn't married to, and here she was, sitting at our breakfast table! Dennis said nothing in front of the girl but it was clear to us that he was displeased. Mom was polite, but after the girl left, Bonnie and Lowell happened to come over. I heard them talking, and she said that the girls in these parts seemed "fast". Bonnie and Lowell agreed, saying that it was like that here. I had never seen anything like this before. It seemed to me that you should at least love someone before sleeping with them, and that you should know them for quite a while...and that if you weren't married yet, you at least would be planning on getting married at some point, not that that would make it right.

A few days later, I awoke to upset. Kary was gone, and Mom was crying. She said he'd gotten drunk, and that Dennis hated drunks. There had been a fight between them. Kary was going back to Wisconsin. And so we lost the only positive male figure we had.

There was less focus on homeschooling as time went by. We were supposed to be learning with George, but Dennis was convinced he was possessed, and went out of his way to be hostile towards him. The only curriculum we had was one Mom had ordered from some Mennonite place. They were incredibly, impressively dry and uninteresting, even the set on art. All the pictures were black and white and the text was about as dull as it could be. One could almost wonder whether it was intended to imspire Mennonite kids to drop out of school and start farming early. We spent a lot of time that was suppposed to be allocated to schooling, drawing. Mom didn't check up on us, and she never asked to see our work or graded it or directed us in any way. George didn't like my new stained glass technique in the colored pencil drawings. He never asked about the pictures that had gone missing from his sketchbook. I was also developing a cartoon. The characters were two birds named Roy and Ray. The birds wore hats, Roy's blue, and Ray's red. They lived happily together as friends. I filled half a sketchbook with colorful drawings of Roy and Ray.

After struggling to rouse some interest in the Mennonite workbooks and drawing for a while, we could ride the horses. The main thing was that we at least had to go through the motions of sitting down to do homework. I was quite a bit better on horseback now, and could bridle either of the horses easily and jump onto their backs without a fence or stump. With George on Pawnee, Mike on Sugar, and me on Lady, we played what George called "Wargames". In Wargames, your object was to unseat the other riders from their mounts. You could reach over and take the bridle off, try to push the rider off the horse, grab a limb and try to pull them off, whatever had to be done to unseat them without being unseated yourself. We were playing this obviously unsafe game one day when I somehow fell off the horse. I don't remember how, or even which horse I was riding. All I remember is that I fell and saw the flying hooves and underbodies of the horses going over the top of me. After that, nothingess, George upset, crying? Mom freaking out. That was the end of the wargames.

For months now, I'd been whining about wanting a cat. When Dennis had gotten rid of our cats in California, he'd told us that we could get new ones in Idaho. I scoured the newspaper weekly for free cats, and tried to talk them into getting me one. Then one day Dennis returned from Spokane with a box of kittens, one for each of us. I picked a gray female with small apricot colored splotches on her and named her Ricotte. Lisa chose a long haired orange tabby, Sebastian. Mike proudly cuddled Max, a short haired orange tabby, while Gia deicded to call the long haired dark calico Muffin. Strangely enough, we each seemed to get a cat that was suited to our personality. Ricotte was quiet and shy, yet calm and brave. I taught her to ride the horses with me, and she seemed to actually enjoy it. Max was macho and a great mouser, but friendly, just what Mike needed. Sebastian was fussy and took pains to keep himself tidy and clean. He seemed to be almost perfect, and of course Lisa adored him for it. Muffin was soft and cuddly and lovable, and spent most of her time purring in Gia's arms.

Sheba had her puppies, six of them. They were all black and fluffy, with their hair poofing out like a chow's. They all had mouths and tongues that were almost completely black. They were too small to give away yet.

One day, Dennis called me before I had a chance to elude him, before I could hide in the little room in the dairy barn where I kept the small polished stones I'd been finding in the big barn, and other trinkets. He said it was time for me to learn how to work. He directed me to a huge pile of lumber, jumbled out into the floor of the barn just like jumbo pick up sticks. He gave me a measuring tape and told me I had to sort and stack them by size, and also to pick out the ones which weren't any good, which were broken in half, or had huge knotholes, or were so badly warped that they couldn't be stacked, etc. He told me not to quit until it was all sorted an dstacked. Then he left. I wanted to cry. The task seemed insurmountable. I'd be there for days! I wanted to tell him that there was no way I could possibly do all this, but he was gone, and I was afraid to disobey him. I pulled a board of of the pile and measured it. Another, and another. Gradually, piles formed. After an hour or two, it was all stacked except for the culls. I looked at the spot where the pile had been, and back at the stacks. It was immensely satisfying. I had never done work of any kind except for dishes and occasionally mowing the lawn. I had had no idea that I was actually capable of this sort of work. This realization was the greatest and primary gift Dennis would give me.

Dennis still wasn't working and hadn't been the entire time we were at the house in Highland Flats. I have no idea how we paid the rent or if it was ever paid at all. The woman who owned the place called one day. She was upset about the hayfield, worried that he would try to cut the alfalfa in the hayfields and sell it. We hadn't done so yet, but this is exactly the sort of thing he would have done. She told us we had to leave. Mom and Dennis were nearly frantic. There were almost no jobs in these parts and no rentals to be found. The only certain thing was that we'd be moving.

I was privately distraught. I have always formed a strong attachment to place, (whereas I care deeply for relatively few people, who then maintain a place in my heart for life) and having finally adjusted somewhat to the Idahoan lifestyle, the last thing I wanted to do was to move. I walked through the barns and brooded, sorted through the treasures (polished pebbles and stones, cobalt blue marbles, sardine tin keys, that sort of thing) in their band aid tins and little boxes, went out and leant against the horses, trying to derive some comfort from their warm animals presence. I looked up at Roman Nose mountain, which overlooked the farm and thought of how I would miss it. I couldn't take this land, this place, with me. I'd never see it again. My soul rebelled against the idea.

Pawnee's hoofbeats clattered distantly, then closer, and George drew up by the far corner of the dairy barn. I went over and talked where we couldn't be seen from the house. I told him that Dennis was planning to move, and that I had to stay. I hated Dennis, he was mean, and I wanted to live with someone else. George said that Bonnie and Lowell were foster parents, perhaps they'd take me in and I could stay with them. We lit upon this possibility with youthful optimism and discussed it awhile. But, I said, I wasn't sure my dad would let me, that he would give me up to them. He still retained legal custody of my sister and I. Maybe I should move back there. I had had enough of Dennis. When my mom sent for us, one of my dad's requirements was that the plane tickets be round trip, without a return date specified, so that if we changed our minds, we could come back easily. George said that didn't sound quite right, that the tickets were probably expired by now, and who knew if my mom had even kept them? I would probably have to move with the rest of the family unless we could convince my mom and Dennis to let me stay.

In the house, they were making moving preperations already. Over the next few days, I tried to convince them that I should stay, that I was happy here, and Bonnie and Lowell could have me. They were both teachers, so they could continue my homeschooling. Their reaction to this prospect was hostile and pointed. There was no way they'd let me go to live there, I belonged with my family, and the only reason I wanted to stay was because I had a crush on George. George had too much influence on me, the devil was trying to seduce me, and it was a good thing we were moving so I'd never see him again. They inserted a lot of nasty remarks about Bonnie and Lowell, who I had thought were their friends. In time I would learn that my mom and Dennis had no real friends, no one whom they trusted or did not attack behind their backs. They had no sense of loyalty, no lasting bonds. The only certain things about their friends was that in time (and usally not very long) the friends whom they had once spoken of so kindly would become the villians in whon no good trait could be found. Noone was exempt from the paranoia, the suspicion....including the members of our own family.

Everything was packed up. Lady and Sugar had been returned to Bonnie and Lowell, along with Cisco. The big Airstream trailer (this had been here waiting for us when we arrived, since Dennis had brought it to Idaho on an earlier trip) was crammed full of stuff and hitched up to the crewcab. This time, the cats and dogs could come with us. We were moving to Priest Lake, a place I'd never even heard of before. Well, they were moving to Priest Lake. I was laying on my belly in the middle of the alfalfa field. There was so much commotion that I thought perhaps they would overlook my absence and leave without me. I laid there for a long time and listened to them, waiting anxiously for the engines to start, to hear the sound of the vehicles grow smaller as they went down the road. Instead, there was a lot of hollering and shouting and ordering as always, and it seemed to stretch on for hours. My stuff was already carefully packed away in the same boxes I'd used in the move from Running Springs. I didn't especially mind if I lost the stuff, as long as I could stay. And then, the dreaded sound: my mother calling me. I heard her asking the others where I was. I hoped she would get distracted and turn her attention to something else. She tended to not have a long attention span, and to get easily flustered. Alas, she kept calling me, and she walked around the barns calling, calling, saying that everyone else was ready to go, where was I? Eventually, realizing that she wasn't going to give up and I would have to go, I stood up and trudged to the truck reluctantly.

We drove out of Naples, past Elmira. Lots of drama from mom when the trailer started fishtailing on the curvy road. I didn't care. I didn't even look at the scenery or pay much attention to sleepy-town Sandpoint. All I could think of was that with each mile that passed under our wheels, we were that much further from Naples, from George, from the horses, from everything familiar. We drove for what seemed like three hours.

It's funny, I don't even remember arriving at the new house, or exploring the area. I was assigned a bedroom in a large 2 story kit-home log cabin, the sort that has milled logs which are all precisely the same shape and diameter and are stained. It smelled like cedar. I don't remember anything much about the first month or so except that I hardly ate or left my new bedroom. Time was a fog. I cried and brooded and would hardly talk to anyone. I didn't go outside. I hated Dennis for constantly disparaging George, and my dad, and the entire Hill family, for pretending to be so righteous and holier than thou, for always looking for the worst in people and picking on them for it. I didn't even unpack most of my stuff for weeks. I could have had a bed, but I just laid a few blankets in the closet and holed up in there all day long, reading the bible, searching for verses that would illustrate how rotten Dennis really was. the room was almost bare except for a little stack of clothing, the blankets in the closet, and the bible. I arranged these few things obsessively, meticulously, and drew comfort from the stark desolation of the space mirroring the way I felt. When mom begged me to participate in family stuff or to act happy, I told them I wanted to go and live with Bonnie and Lowell, and turned a deaf ear to all their reasons why I couldn't. I was sick and tired of Dennis' bandying bible verses around out of context, or quoting them incorrectly, or making it out to say something it didn't just to suit his own purposes. I determined that I'd read enough of it to stand up to him, because he couldn't argue against the bible.

I don't know how I came out of this fog, but it was a gradual thing. A plastic milk crate appeared in my room, and I filled it with books...the few books that I had. I found a glass wine bottle whose shape pleased me, and I filled it with water and just enough food coloring to be the perfect shade of blue. A wider mouthed wine carafe was filled with the marbles and polished stones. Another crate appeared..I set a scrap piece of plywood across the two and made a desk. I began to draw again. I drew a mouse crouching in terror in a corner, with a cat approaching slowly, its back to the viewer. The cat was Dennis, I felt like the mouse. I drew lots of horses.

In time, I joined the others in exploring the outdoors. There were wild strawberries of suprising intensity. There were thimbleberries, dry, mealy things with a tart, bright flavor, thinwalled and shaped like a thimble. The house was fairly close to the lake, maybe 1/4 mile away. We ran far and wide. There were only two bicycles; my sister's and a folding one that Mike usually used, so I would run through the woods and brush on the deer trails, taking shortcuts they couldn't, trying to beat them to the berries. Mom got the idea that a lichen locally known as "elk ears" was valuable to artists, so Mike and I then tried to outdo one another in collecting elk ears. They were frequently found in swampy areas, but also in a forest of tamarack (larch) where the fallen logs were so large that I had to climb over them. A neighbor moved out of their house, and we discovered columbines going to seed, collected the seeds, and traipsed around trying to sell them to our neighbors. We climbed trees and built forts. The girls stayed home and made cookies and sewed frilly lace heart shaped pockets to fill with potpourri. I was gone for hours at a time, often not returning until sunset, out walking around, skirting the edge of the lake, savoring the solitude.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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