This is what happened::

2011-04-30T17:36:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-29T17:36:00.000-07:00

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 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 come 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.

2011-04-28T17:33:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-27T17:33:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-26T17:32:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-25T17:31:00.000-07:00

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.....

2011-04-24T17:30:00.000-07:00

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 charasmatic type. His god saw what we did and disapproved- every unkind thought or rude action was noted and dutifully written down aagainst you, to be replayed on an overhead screen after your death when you stood before the judgement 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 has 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 daylights out of me, especially since she said that my dad had a whopper following him around. Pretty soon I was dreamign 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.

2011-04-23T17:30:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-22T17:29:00.000-07:00

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 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 Retreiver 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) her boyfriend (also named Matt) and her were driving soemwhere 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.

2011-04-21T17:27:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-20T17:26:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-19T17:25:00.000-07:00

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 Wildness 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.

2011-04-18T17:25:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-17T17:24:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-16T17:22:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-15T17:21:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-14T17:20:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-13T17:19:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-12T17:18:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-11T17:16:00.000-07:00

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 fo 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 newfoudn 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 has 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.

2011-04-10T17:15:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-09T17:15:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-08T17:14:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-07T17:13:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-06T17:12:00.000-07:00

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 noone 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 a fodd 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 occured, 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 wiltingly 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 worshipping with the wrong names and would go to hell for worshipping 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 worshipping 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 soemthign 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......

2011-04-05T17:11:00.000-07:00

Our family became even more patriarchal than it had previously been with the advent of our more extreme and isolating belief system. We had always had to take Dennis' boots and socks off at the end of the day (he was too fat to reach his feet easily) and rub his smelly feet. We were all well trained in massaging his back, neck, shoulders, legs, head, arms, hands and even his butt. Lisa was the one to call if he wanted to be walked on or pounded vigorously. Mike was usually enlisted for the feet and butt duty. Gia was rarely called at all. I was the one he called when he wanted something gentle, soothing, and steady. He used to say that my hands felt different, that I had "healing hands". I think he was probably just trying to motivate me by catering to my ego, but I did put some effort into trying to do a good job. The consequences of irritating him were usually fairly unpleasant, while making him happy sometimes spared you more odious tasks.

We were expected to wait on him at the table, to pour his coffee, to notice when it was nearing empty and refill it without his having to ask. He only used certain plates, cups, glasses, and silverware. If for some reason you gave him the 'wrong' dish or fork, he would loudly demand the right one. He made much ado of his (supposed) royal ancestry and insisted that we treat him as a king. His so-called superiority extended to food as well. Often, everyone in the family would eat lentil soup or a very simple macaroni dish or venison stew while he devoured a steak. The rest of us considered it fantastic if we got a hamburger once in a while. He ate only real butter, the margarine was for us, etc etc. We weren't allowed to just eat whatever we wanted to from the fridge or cupboard. It might be his. Besides, there still wasn't much food. We were subsisting mainly on food boxes from the food bank. But if there was something nice, it was his. The biggest and the best of anything was his, since he imagined himself to be a king.

Mealtimes were fraught with anxiety. If there was a dessert, you had better eat it first and quickly. Savoring each bite slowly or saving it until after the main dish was a certain route to losing it entirely. Noone wanted to sit next to Dennis for this reason. He would reach right over onto your plate and take whatever was the best. If there was an olive, he would nab it. Dessert, gone! Complaining or making a fuss only gave him more time to take more food from your plate. One's only defense was to bolt down the most favored foods as fast as you could. Conversely, if you did not like a food, it was best to choke it down and not let on that you found it disgusting. If he detected a food aversion, he would heap a large serving of it for you and insist that you eat each and every bite, even if it meant sitting at the table for over an hour while he glared at you belligerently.

What bothered me the most though, was his habit of suddenly asking me what I was thinking. I have always felt that my mind is the most private, inviolable part of me, that my thoughts are nobody else's business. If I answered him honestly, my thoughts were usually about something he considered frivolous and a waste of time. He would criticize me for it and tear me apart in front of the family. He would suggest all sorts of other things I should be thinking of instead. How to please him, how to prepare myself to be a good wife, how to act more like my sister Lisa (his favorite), of spiritual matters, and so on. The tirade could drag on for over half an hour or more if I disagreed with him even slightly, even silently by not wholeheartedly endorsing everything he said. Being stubborn, I hardly ever agreed with him heartily, so I was frequently singled out for this sort of thing. It could be something as insignificant as the way I shook the salt and pepper shakers, the way I walked, or the fact that I didn't at all mind going on my daily walk in the pouring rain. After a while, since I was opposed to lying, when he asked me what I was thinking, I would quickly think of something I knew he'd approve of, and then answer him truthfully: "Oh, I was just thinking of how Yahweh created so many different types of trees." or "I was praying for my Dad's family to come to the full truth of Yahshua and for their souls to be delivered from the evil one." etc. This tactic got me off the hook without fail, though he would eye me distrustfully at times.

If at any time anyone in the family (including my mom) opposed him in any way, a row would ensue. There would be much shouting about how he was the head of the household, how he was the king of the family, how he was the provider (ironic, since he hadn't had a single job since moving to Idaho). During one such scene, he demanded that we all acknowledge that he was our King. One by one, the other children said that he was their king. My turn came. I wouldn't do it. "Yahweh is King", I said quietly. This infuriated him. He was practically frothing at the mouth. He turned to my mother for support, but she agreed with me. The Bible made it quite clear that Yahweh was the King of kings. He fumed. Finally he sputtered, "I am the king of this family!" Needless to say, this incident didn't endear me to him at all.

The man was constantly humiliating us and calling us names. He frequently called me a nigger, because I wasn't fastitidious as Lisa was. I will admit that at that age my hygiene left a lot to be desired for a teenaged girl. Also, I ran around in the woods all day long, so my jeans got torn out at the knees and stained from grass, tree sap, and plain old dirt. I came home wet up to my waist from wading in the lake or in creeks. Because I wore glasses, he would often call me a myopic pig. He relished telling dinner guests of how Mike and Gia had been wild and out of control when he met them, how they had physically attacked him in an attempt to drive him away (one can't say they didn't try...) but he had whupped them into shape. Or of how ugly Gia had been at birth, shriveled up like a little raisin. Or of the fact that Mike had wet his pants a few times as a small child. Every humilating thing that we had ever done or that had happened to us was thrown into our faces time and again. The only one he hardly picked on was Lisa.

2011-04-04T17:10:00.000-07:00

We located other people who shared our beliefs; The Assembly of Yahweh in Rochester Missouri. They placed less emphasis on prophecy and direct communication than we did, but the constraints were similar. The Assembly Of Yahweh put out a publication, The Master Key, which was distributed free of charge across the country and even to South America and the Philippines. They sent us a box of back issues and got us signed up for current issues, and we spent much time reading these magazines. My mom sometimes said that Yahweh had revealed deeper truths to her which these people hadn't been shown yet, that she had a direct line to Yahshua which they did not, because she had actually seen him. There was another Assembly in Pennsylvania led by Jacob O'Meyer. Jacob O'Meyer was something of a fruitcake; even we could see that. He believed that Jerusalem was actually located in the United States, specifically, in Pennsylvania, and more specifically, in the exact location of his church, and that he was a prophet. He spent a lot of time showing how the Old Testament prophecies were actually referring to him and his church. We found his publication interesting but preferred the one from Missouri, which was more grounded.

There was also a local Assembly of Yahweh in Spokane, Washington. We visited it once or twice. They were fairly charasmatic. The pastor's wife was a tiny woman who wore 6"+ heels to try to make herself look taller, had her hair done up like a T.V. evangelist's wife, and wore too much makeup. We didn't believe in wearing any makeup. Dennis said it was a legacy of the prostitues of Babylon and that makeup was only for whores. Still, it was nice to find other people that we could worship with, even if they did occasionally use words we believed were evil, such as "awesome".

Sheba gave birth again. She had a puppy that Mike got attached to. He named it Toby. By the time Toby was 6 weeks old, Mike was trying to teach it. Mom said he could keep Toby. Dennis said it was a possibility. My brother spent hours upon end with Toby, cuddling the puppy. Mike, who seemed so brittle and tough, had a crack in his armor, a soft place in his heart and the puppy filled it. He taught Toby to sit on command, to come when called, to lay down, and other commands. He was so proud of his puppy. I was supposed to teach the other puppies to obey a little, to learn basic commands so they'd be easier to give away. I went out with a handful of dog food and threw it to them one piece at a time until they learned to catch it in the air. Then I told them to sit. The ones who sat spontaneously got a pebble of dog food. The others quickly learned to sit when told. They sat in a line and I tossed a piece of dog food to each puppy. I named them each (except for Toby) and would give each puppy a piece of food when I called it. Because they were half Border Collie, they were bright and learned their names quickly.

Dennis called his children in California every few days and begged them to come up to Idaho. He'd been reading a book about earthquakes, and said that California was going to crack along the San Andreas fault. They would fall into the ocean if they stayed. California was cursed by Yahweh because of the homosexuals, it was like Sodom and Gommorah, and would be destroyed. They must escape while they could.

Meanwhile, my mom spent hours in her bedroom asking Yahweh what her dreams meant. He talked to her a lot. She told us that he'd speak to us, too. I wondered wny he didn't speak to me. I guessed that maybe I didn't have enough faith. He showed her that UPC codes were evil, that they might even be the mark of the beast. Every UPC code in the house was searched our diligently and crossed out with a black marker. Things such a UPC codes, pagan names, and other evil things were considered "open doors". An open door could result in a demon gaining access to our household, and the demon might deceive us or harm us in some way. If we seemed to be having a lot of problems, mom would ask Yahweh where the open doors were, so she could close them. It turned out we had a lot of open doors for Satan to get in and harrass us: clowns, rabbits, heart symbols, Christmas trees, gnomes, elves, unicorns, Cabbage Patch dolls, Barbies, pegasus, Santa, snakes, crows...we were surrounded by evil! No wonder we weren't successful, no wonder Dennis hadn't foudn a job, no wonder we were unhappy and fighting so much! They fired up the woodstove. Into it went any clothing, toys, or items with the evil emblems. The clown blanket she'd made for me as a baby, the only shred of our early childhood, went up in flames. So did our treasured toys, even the stuffed rabbit my Aunt Linda had designed and made for me for my birthday. The C.S. Lewis books, poof! It made me sad, but they said I shouldn't feel any pain about this. Whose side was I on, Yahweh's or Satan's? If I wasn't for the right side, I was against it. Did I want to see demons again? Of course I didn't. Of course, we still had problems after purging our home of so much evil. That meant we hadn't got it all. We searched again, all through the house. In Lisa's closet, concealed behind the other clothes, were all the sweaters and clothes with hearts. Some of them had been given to her by our grandma Hill, and she didn't want to burn them. My mother was incensed. She felt that not only was Lisa sneaky, she had more loyalty to the woman who had deprived her of seeing her own children, her ex-husband's mother. Lisa gave the things up to Mom to be destroyed (she had no choice), but a rift had started to develop between the two.

2011-04-03T17:09:00.000-07:00

Dennis went back to California for a short time. Our financial situation was going downhill, and I think he had some kind of business to settle down there. He took some of the handmade wooden items that Don Christson made, presumably to sell them at a profit above what Don would make and then pay Don his asking price. It may be that we had left some of our belongings down there and he went to retrieve or sell some of them, I'm not sure. We children were frequently left in the dark about such th ings. Mom would simply tell us we didn't need to know.

At any rate, I don't remember missing him at all. We played a lot of games when we weren't running around outside. My favorite was Othello, which even Dennis couldn't beat me at, but noone would play me. I usually had to play it solitaire style. We taped little pieces of paper to some of the Othello pieces to designate them as chess pieces, and played chess with them (the board has the same number of squares). My mom hated chess because it was my dad's favorite game, and after awhile she decided it was evil, and I had to peel all the tape off the pieces. Mike had a Battleship game that we enjoyed. Monopoly invariably led to fights. There was another one that I would love to get my hands on today: Pathfinder. In this game, each party had a board shielded from the opponents view. The board was grooved to allow the placement of partitions to make a maze. You would make your mazes, and then try to work your way through the other person's maze blindfolded, so to speak. If you used the entirety of the board for one long, twisting maze with only one ending, then you only had as many turns as the board had spaces before your opponent won, unless you could get to the end of their maze before that. Generally it was best to provide a few traps or dead ends, but that limited the number of spaces for the true ending if they happened to find it. We loved to play Pathfinder. I loved mazes in general and drew a lot of them on paper. Often they'd be in the shape of animals, such as cats.

When Dennis came back, full of his usual pomposity and bravado and ego, he brought with him big boxes of very sour small oranges. They were nearly impossible to eat even if you enjoyed very sour things, which I did. Mom made them into orange marmalade and canned it. She was also making another garden. I steered clear of the garden, remembering how the one in Naples had turned out. I don't remember our harvetsing anything at all from it.

I was building a fort in the back yard with branches and plastic sheeting and soft grass and thistledown. I wanted to be able to hide in it or to sleep in it overnight, but so far it wasn't waterproof. Mike came out to me in tears. Toby was in his arms. He said that Dennis had revoked his promise to let him keep Toby and was saying that he'd have to give him away. I told him we could put him in my fort and hide him there. We tried, but Toby ran right out to us, wagging his tail happily. Desperate, Mike ran over to a further part of the yard and tried to make a little pen with logs. If we could get Toby to stay in there, we could pretend he'd run away or gotten lost somehow. Toby wouldn't stay in the pen. He kept climbing or slipping out and running over to Mike. He yelled at him that he had to stay in the pen even as his cheeks were wet with tears, but it was no use. Toby loved his owner and wouldn't stay in that pen. Mike sat down on the ground and sobbed with Toby in his arms. A few days later, Toby had been given away.

2011-04-02T17:09:00.000-07:00

Summer was still in full swing when Dennis got off the phone with a smile on his face. Our prayers had been answered: not only were his daughters and their husbands were moving to Idaho, Kary was also coming back. Mike and I were ecstatic about Kary's return. Michelle's husband, Sam, would also be fun.

They were there within a few days. Renee's husband Joe seemed less than enthused, but he and Dennis were civil to one another for a change. Renee was bubbly and effusive as usual. Michelle had brought her dog, Mattie, a Doberman with long, uncut ears and tail. She was in the early stages of pregnancy with her first child. Sam lifted everything and waited on her hand and foot. Kary and Sam engaged in playful adult guy behavior and goofed off a little. The problem now was, where would we put them all? Kary gladly accepted the stairwell and pegged up a blanket over the area, laying a slender mattress down to sleep on. This left 3 married couples, 4 kids and 4 bedrooms to put them in. I volunteered to give my room up, and Renee and Joe moved right in. Gia had been in a large room upstairs that wasn't intended as a bedroom, but functioned well as one. It had a balcony complete with sliding glass door. She gave this up for Sam and Michelle. I moved in with Mike, and Lisa and Gia moved in together. Mike and I played with marbles and read his boy's life magazines and pored through Cabela's catalogs drooling over the survival gear. We didn't mind the changes too much. It was clear that Yahweh wanted Dennis' daughters to move to Idaho, and after all that praying and Dennis' pleading with them every night or two, it had finally come to pass.

Once we were all moved in, Mike, Sam, Kary and I spent a lot of time outdoors in the woods. We explored new areas. They went fishing, which I wasn't a real fan of. It's always bothered me to have to impale the worm on a fishhook. We looked for grouse and antlers. The dogs came with us. Outside, running around like that, everything seemed great, but trouble was already beginning to surface. Almost every night, we heard Michelle hissing at Sam, "No! You'll hurt the baby!" Sam was possessed of a truly saintly disposition. Joe rarely spent time with the family. If he wasn't in the bedroom, he and Renee were out walking alone together. Renee was a flirt. She flopped down seductively into the already deprived Sam's lap as though he were a comfortable armchair. Michelle resented her voluptuous sister's friendliness with her mate. Renee teased Kary, too. It was in her nature. Kary chewed Copenhagen before he got out of bed, a habit that Denis razzed him for. Michelle criticized the way we kept out animals and seemed to think Mattie was a human. She wanted to bring her dog indoors, but Denis' rules against this were strict. She wailed and whined that Mattie always slept in their bed and wouldn't be happy if she had to stay outside with the other dogs. Dennis said she'd get worms from Mattie sleeping in the bed, Michelle screeched back at him...conflict was everywhere.

One of the problems that arose during Renee and Michelle's visit was the lack of diversity in our diet. We had no butter. They wailed that they couldn't eat their oatmeal without butter. I thought they were lucky we had milk that wasn't reconstitued from powder. We ate hot cereal, soup, potatoes or pasta at almost every meal. The soup was usually lentil soup, or if we were lucky, hamburger vegetable soup. The men, always served first, usually took large helpings of the best of whatever was there. If it was a casserole with cheese melted on the top, they'd scoop off most of the cheese, leaving the rest of it, cheeseless, for the women and children. Our food was plain. We ate whatever we had, and we didn't have much.

There were bills that had to be paid and no way to pay them. Mom told each child to pray for Yahweh to show us the answer she was praying about, and then one by one, she took us into the garage and asked us to show her His answer. I had no idea what she was asking for. I felt sheepish and confused, so I seized upon the first thing that caught my eye: a pair of old sneakers.

"Those!" I said.
"Those dirty tennis shoes?" Mom looked puzzled.
"Um, yeah, I think that's what he said..."

I was beginning to feel cornered...it wasn't fair of her not to tell us the question. She sighed and ushered me back into the house. Dennis was standing at the door.

"What did He say?" Dennis asked?
"Well, I don't think it's the dirty tennis shoes," Mom replied.

They were trying to discover something of value that could be pawned or sold. I felt so stupid. I was a false prophet now...I hadn't heard right.

Kary, Sam, Mike and I spent a lot of time out of the house and in the woods. It was the only way to stay sane. Mike and I prayed for Yahweh to let us find and kill a grouse so that we could bring it home proudly to help feed the family. I found one, but I'd forgotten the slingshot at home. I resorted to picking up small stones and trying to knock it out of the tree. The first few times, it flapped its wings but kept clutching the branch. Finally it flew off and left me dejected. We'd read of all those miracles in the Bible; fish and bread to feed five thousand, vessels that never ran out of food or oil, sacrifice rams magically appearing at the last minute, manna from heaven, quail flying right into the hands of the Israelites...why wouldn't Yahweh give us just one grouse? Mom and Dennis said we were a family of prophets, and yet this grouse that had been almost within the reaches of my hand, and which stayed on the branch even as I threw rocks at it, flew away? Why? It really was frustrating, because I believed with my whole heart, I had faith that Yahweh could provide anything at all for us. Faith was supposed to move mountains...why weren't things working out for us, when we all believed so hard?

Back at the house one morning, Michelle was harping about our homeschooling, why we weren't doing any lessons. It's true that our education was distinctly unstructured, but I at least did make an effort to do some work independently. She said that all we did was to play and run around. Then she turned on me. She decided for sone reason that I shouldn't be allowed to go walking, that I had to stay home. I thought this was baloney, but Mom said I had to obey Michelle. Michelle taunted and carped at and ridiculed me. She forced me to stand in the corner, which would have been fine if I had been allowed to stand there in my own solitude. Then I could just stand there and zone out on ideas fantasies, thoughts, or if worse came to worse, search out the wood grain for swirls and knotholes and patterns that reminded me of animals or faces. This was not to be. She hadn't physically confined me to the house so that I could escape from her mentally. She badgered and harassed me for hours while Mom stood by, complicit as usual, even though Michelle had reduced me to a sobbing curled up ball on the floor. Dennis walked in the door around sundown, took in the situation, and called his daughter off me. I fled to the safety of the bedroom, wondering why in the heck we had ever prayed for her to come up here.

Renee, Joe, Sam and Michelle left to return to California soon after that. Dennis warned that Yahweh would curse them for going back to Egypt, but they left anyway. I wasn't sorry. Kary stayed a little longer, but he was leaving us too, going back to the Marines. He worked through lots of paperwork with what seemed like really nosy questions and before long, he was gone too.

2011-04-01T17:07:00.000-07:00

Summer was drawing to a close. The water seemed to grow a little colder with each passing day, and as I skirted the edge of the lake, there were almost no boats buzzing through the quietness. The tamarack trees turned a deep gold, blending with the lighter yellow of the alders and birches. These were the only trees I knew the names of. There was a tree with needles, whose bark was covered in sap filled blisters. If you popped the blisters, the smelly sap ran out and got all over your fingers. This one we called "bubble sap", it was actually a grand fir fir or balsam fir. I read in a book that you could chew the sap of a spruce tree like chewing gum. It said that spruce trees were distinguished by their silvery-blue needles. I looked all through the neighborhood, an area of at least a mile, and finally found what I was fairly certain was a spruce tree. I climbed it and pried off a piece of dried sap that had oozed out onto the bark. I confidently popped it into my mouth and tried to chew it. Ugh! It was awful! I persisted, because the book had said that it was crumbly at first and improved in quality with chewing, but it didn't get any better. It tasted just exactly the way a pine tree smells, except that the resinous flavor was permeating my entire mouth. I finally spat it out, but the flavor remained. Once home, I tried a variety of tactics in an attempt to rid myself of the taste. Brushing my teeth didn't help. Water just tasted like pine sap. Food tasted like sap. Everything that entered my mouth tasted just like that tree for at least a day. I probably selected some tree other than a spruce, but I never mustered up the courage to try again.

My birthday came in September. Dennis asked what I'd like, and I requested a pair of stilts like the ones I'd seen for sale in Don Christson's woodcrafts shop. He got them for me. At first I couldn't even stand on them. I tried to mimic the pictures I'd seen of people wrapping their arms back around the stilts, but couldn't seem to get anywhere like that. With time I was able to walk around on them with relative ease holding them the other way. It was satisfying indeed to be tall for once, taller than anyone in the family, walking around on those stilts made of larch wood from the local tamarack trees.

Dennis made some friends in Priest River, Steve and Verna McNearney. He took Mike and I with him one day, a rare occurence. We hardly ever left the house except on foot, and if one of us did, it was usually Mom or Lisa, because Dennis was fond of Lisa and she always looked nice, usually had a dress or a skirt on, whereas I had my grubby jeans and hiking boots more often than not. Steve and Verna lived in a nice trailer above the lumber mill across the river. We got out of the truck, and were instantly greeted by a black Labrador who leapt and jumped all over us joyfully. Within the trailer, a shrill yapping commenced and continued incessantly. The door opened, and a little Dachshund hurtled out of the trailer and flung itself at us with its piercing little voice. Verna screamed at him, but he ignored her completely. "Bozo! Bozo!!!!", she shrieked. The lab turned his attention to her and almost bowled her over. She was a frail little old gal with white hair, and he probably weighed more than she did. She yelled and griped and kvetched at him. It turned out that Bozo liked balls and sticks, so I played fetch with him. He was a relentless, if overly exuberant, dog. The yappy little sausage dog went back into the trailer with Dennis and Verna. Mike and I spent the whole time playing with Bozo.

A week or two later, Verna sent Bozo home with us. He was more than she could handle, and she was afraid he'd injure her unwittingly. We were to train him for her. I don't remember training him much, although Dennis might have. We took him for walks, played with him every day, and he calmed down. He was always happy and bouncy, but if he jumped on us, we gave him the knee in the chest and told him "down!". He probably just needed someone to spend time with him. Bozo was with us for a month or two. I was sad to see him go, but we could always play with him when we went to visit Steve and Verna. He didn't jump on her anymore. Besides, she'd sent another dog home with us to keep: Bruno.

Bruno was an eldery Saint Bernard. Verna hadn't had him for very long. He'd been chained under someone's porch and his hair was all matted. He drooled constantly and moved with noticeable effort. His old hips were sore. Bruno and I took a liking to one another. He was the sweetest, most faithful dog I've ever encountered. Yeah, he slobbered all the time, and he smelled like an old dog, but he went with me on every single walk I took unless we chained him or kept him indoors, and then if I left, he howled mournfully. I almost always took him along. He hardly ever made any noise, and was my constant companion. The owners Verna had rescued him from had made him stay under that porch even in the winter, when the snow and ice built up under it, and we attributed this to his poor condition. Because he was such a well behaved old hound and not in the best shape, Dennis actually allowed him indoors. I spent hours combing the mats out of his coat by the woodstove while he gazed at me appreciatively with his soulful eyes.

2011-03-31T17:06:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-03-30T17:06:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

2011-03-29T17:02:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-03-28T17:00:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

2011-03-27T17:00:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

2011-03-26T16:57:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

2011-03-25T16:56:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

2011-03-24T16:55:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

2011-03-23T16:54:00.000-07:00

Early winter brought changes into our family, some small, some drastic and life-impacting.

Sheba came into heat. Dennis didn't want her to get pregnant, so he chained her and the rapidly aging Bruno just out of breeding range. Of course, I spent a lot of time around the animals, and so I knew that she would be having puppies anyway, by a bad tempered yellow dog whose tail curled up over his back. He was a mixed breed, probably part Chow or Akita , possibly part Husky. I didn't like him, and I chased him away when I could, but he inevitably got to her anyway. Bruno watched these affairs miserably. I knew that Bruno didn't have many years left. He could hardly walk anymore and dragged his hindquarters around behind him through the snow when his legs gave out. So I moved his chain, just barely, only a foot or two. It was enough. I hoped that maybe Sheba would have a few of his puppies, too, a legacy of the loving loyal St. Bernard.

Mom got sick; really, really sick. We never went to doctors, relying instead on prayer for divine healing. She had a thyroid disorder and had been taking meds for it in California, but had declared herself healed of it one day and threw them all out. The current illness was some sort of a cold. She said it was a mastoid infection. Whatever it was, it caused excruciating pain, hypersensitivty to sound, fever, and she was bedridden for a number of days. We tiptoed about the house whispering while she cried and begged us not to shout (our whispering sounded like shouting to her), trying to keep the household together, cooking dinner and taking care of ourselves. She took Sudafed, but it didn't help. One evening, she weakly called me into her bedroom. She wanted me to check the closet, because she thought she'd seen a demon in it. I didn't particularly want to see a demon, but I looked anyway, while she babbled incoherently alternating with fragments of prayer for protection from Satan's evil forces. I searched the room and found no demons. She said that perhaps it was the Sudafed. Maybe it was, or maybe it was a harbinger of things to come.

Eventually she recovered of course, and Christmas drew near. We weren't allowed to even think about Christmas. Instead we studied the pagan origins of the holiday and wrote letters to our family begging them to forsake this wicked practice. Of course, we didn't relish writing these letters, but Mom and Denis made us do it, they forced us to call our family in Illinois and tell them we didn't want any Christmas presents. They wrote terse little notes the entire time we were on the phone, telling us what to say even it was completely out of context with the flow of the conversation we were having. If we didn't comply, the notes would get emphatic, and then we would be cut off, the phone taken away, hung up, and we would be berated for hours on end in the aftermath. I hated it. I couldn't stand the anxiety, the pressure, the lies we were supposed to tell about attending school in Bonner's Ferry when we actually lived in Priest Lake and hadn't been to a single day of school. After a while, when the calle dme downstairs to talk on the phone, I simply curled up under a coffe table and refused to speak to anyone. Then Mom would point to me and say, "See, look how anxious she is talking to her father! She's terrified of him!". Letter writing was just as bad, and so it wasn't very long before I hardly wrote to my family at all. I couldn't endure the constant pressure to try to persuade them of this or that theological truth, or to ask for money from this relative, or to lie and pretend life was all happy-happy, good-good in northern Idaho and we were oh so glad to be there.

Christmas Eve came. We tried to conceal our disappointment. Lisa wept openly when she discovered that Denis had eaten her can of olives, her Thanksgiving present. He simply laughed at her and said she should have eaten them, but she said she was saving them. Mike and I had stashes of dried apples and prunes in our rooms, but we didn't tell anyone...it wasn't allowed to have private stores of food or money anymore, even a little bit, even a penny. We were trying hard to be happy when a knock came at the door. We went to it, but nobody was there. Upon opening it, we saw several presents left on the porch for us! There was a big white teddy bear with a red ribbon bow sitting on top. The girsl cried out happily and hugged it, bickering over which one of them would get it. I wanted to touch it.... I don't remember what the other present were. I think there may have been fruitcake or cookies or something edible and festive, but all I really remember is the bear. We wondered aloud over who could have left us the presents. We couldn't think of anyone except for the neighbors across the street, but they'd never paid us the slightest ntoice. I went upstairs, full of happiness and warmth. I gazed out the bedroom window at air patterns in the beam of the shop light for hours, trying to imagine who could have done this, and how nice it was of them.

As it turned out, none of the people I'd imagined had left the gifts on our porch. Our benefactor was a man living nearby. Mike and I had frequently trespassed onto his land and peered at his house. We'd decided long ago that he was a cranky, mean old man that might yell at us, even though we'd never seen this fictional character. It was reason enough not to linger too long around the house, which was nearly always empty.

In fact, the man sitting at our kitchen table and drinking coffee with our parents was in his late thirties, with the first hints of male pattern baldness emerging from his sandy colored hair. His eyes sparkled with extreme intelligence and wit. His lean and muscular frame leaned forward slightly whether he stood or sat, as though he were used to hunching over papers and keyboards for hours on end, which he was, for Mark was a scientist. We quickly took to this kindly stranger, especially Mike and me. He also like animals, and we showed him our cats and dogs, and tried to set him up with one of the puppies Sheba was still pregnant with. The man was fascinating. First of all, he was totally unlike Denis, and secondly, he was very patient, quiet, knowledgable about a wide array of subjects and he told us when he thought something was B.S., very politely of course. He didn't seem to get tired of us and we could ask him a lot of questions, for which he seemed to know most of the answers. Mom wanted us to push our beliefs on to him, and since he was such a wonderful person, we agreed that we didn't want him to go to hell. When we told him some of what we believed, he inclined his head at an angle, seeming interested, skeptical and perhaps fascinated by our strange belief system. He was well mannered enough not to tell us that our beliefs were baloney.
I was to first one to brave the path to his cabin and knock on his door, and Mike quickly followed. We liked him so well that we spent as much time with him as we could.

2011-03-22T16:53:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

2011-03-21T16:52:00.000-07:00

I'd been interested in science since early childhood, learning dinosaur names, collecting insects, picking apart leaf buds and flowers, and reading my grandfather's old medical books while my peers played house or dressed their dolls. I'd wanted to be a doctor and an artist ever since I could remember. It wasn't until I met Mark that it occurred to me that I could be a scientist, possibly because he was the first one I'd met (or the first that I knew of). Looking back on my days of reading Discover and National Geographic so avidly, or poring over a very thick book on Arctic wildlife, it should have.

At any rate, our association with Mark fanned the sparks of my interest into an inferno, as typically happens with my interests. Unfortunately, I had only very limited resources to feed it: a set of children's encyclopedias, a very few books, a high school biology text, my old microscope, and of course, the great outdoors. I stayed up late every night with that biology book, which had a lot about environmental issues, zoology, human physiology, and what drugs do to the body, but neglected more fundamental biology (it may have been that the basics were taught in an earlier text). It wasn't uncommon for me to go through 2-3 chapters a day, which included carefully doing all the homework on paper, even though there was no one there to grade it. I started collecting plants and pressing them. I had no idea what they were, but I paid a lot of attention to where and how they grew. I read a biography of Marie Curie written by her daughter and thought about how wonderful it would be to devote oneself to science like that. The microscope was used until my eyes ached. Then I decided I'd like to memorize the periodic table, and so I found a spare sheet of posterboard and started copying it down in hopes of hanging it up in my room and learning it. When Denis saw this, he asked me about it. His response was that he admired my intentions, but it was impossible for me to memorize the periodic table, I was wasting my time. Besides, I was going to be a wife someday, why did I need to know it? So I obediently stopped, flipped the posterboard over, and painstakingly wrote down some passage of the Bible instead...wishing the entire time that it were possible for me to memorize the periodic table.

On the home front, life was growing even more difficult. We ran completely out of food. Mike and I nibbled furtively on our stores of dried apple slices. We walked our trails in the woods and tried to kill things with our slingshots, praying to Yahweh for success so that our family could eat. Sheba killed a grouse and we somehow got it from her. It wasn't very much meat. We got a rabbit the same way, but couldn't eat rabbit- it was unclean. I think we made it into dog food. Just when things were getting really desperate, Mom and Denis went to the food bank. In addition to the food box we usually got, they gave us about 40 packages of bread, cans of TVP, and large cans of freeze dried foods. Denis also got a really good deal on lentils from some farmer and bought 100 pounds of lentils. When Mark saw how little we had to eat, he shot a deer for us. Without that venison, we would have had to eat lentil soup every day and possibly for breakfast, had we run out of oatmeal. And of course, we still had some plum jam and orange marmalade to spread on the dry toasted bread (there was no butter) and to eat with the oatmeal (there was no milk to speak of, either). Even the dogs ate lentil soup, since we couldn't afford to buy dog food.

2011-03-20T16:51:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-03-19T16:50:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

2011-03-18T16:49:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-03-17T16:47:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-03-16T16:46:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-03-15T16:45:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

2011-03-14T16:43:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-03-13T16:42:00.000-07:00

Living in the cabin, while better by far than being homeless, was a huge adjustment for us. We quickly discovered that although there were two sinks in the house, the plumbing was broken, allowing water to run out of the broken pipes, which resulted in a huge puddle of water in the front yard. The toilet didn't work at all. The bathtub drained without any apparent problems. None of these had water running to them, and although there was a wellhouse on the property, there didn't seem to be any water on the place.

This meant that we had to haul water to the cabin. Hauling water entailed procuring plastic 55 gallon barrels, rinsing them of whatever chemicals or substances had been in them before, getting hoses for the barrrels, loading them into the truck, driving to a source of water, filling them with water, bringing the water back, and unloading it at the house; a problem because 55 gallons of water weighs approximately 440 pounds. Filling the barrels to begin with was also problematic. Our truck still bore California plates and at that time, Californians were widly unpopular in northern Idaho. The Leonard Paul store in Coolin, a easy walk from our house, refused to let us have water, and neither would any of the other businesses in Coolin. They let us know that there were man eating bears and lions in north Idaho, and that we wouldn't make it through the winter; we should leave Idaho right away. And of course, we were most unwelcome; when the neighbor down the end of the small dirt road to Chase Lake heard Californians were moving in, he went into the cabin and vandalized it, punching holes in the drywall and breaking the window of the back door. We knew it was him because the prints on the walls matched his bootprints..... In the end, we wound up driving all the way to Mark's cabin, which was at least half an hour each way and cost a lot of gas.

Getting the barrels off of the truck was a project in its own right. The rope that held the barrels together towards the front of the truck had to be untied. Then the rope was tied to the back of the truck bed and looped around the closest of the barrels, towards the base so that it wouldn't tip over when the rope was pulled on. One of us would get behind the barrel, using our hips and legs to brace against it and turn and push it to the back of the truck, while several other people pulled on the rope. At all times, pains had to be taken not to allow the barrel to fall over or tip. Once the barrel had been moved to the tailgate of the truck, it was either pushed onto wooden platforms that Eliyah had built outside the cabin, or they were pushed into the house while Eliyah squirted dish soap all over the threshhold of the door in order to ease the barrel's transit into the house. There were barrels for drinking water and "wash water" which was only for baths and washing dishes, not for food. The drinking barrels usually came into the house while the wash barrels sat outside on the platform. Now getting the water out of the barrels was a problem. We used the garden hoses to siphon the water out of the barrels; the end of the hose had to be bent and put on a nail to keep the water from running out of the hose and to prevent losing the siphon.

Then there was the matter of utilizing this water, since it couldn't run down the kitchen sink or be run through the plumbing. Drinking water was used directly from the hose, run straight into the cup or saucepan or whatever. Water for washing hands was kept in a plastic pitcher in the bathroom next to a big stainless steel bowl. We would wet our hands in the dirty water already in the bowl, soap up, and then rinse with clean water from the pitcher. Eliyah couldn't seem to pour his own water and always yelled for us to pour it for him, and then would berate us further if the flow of water was not consistent enough, copious enough, or too copious, etc. Water for dishes or bathing was heated on the woodstove in big aluminum stockpots, which we never used for food; we all knew that aluminum was poisonous and caused Alzheimer's syndrome, just like fluoride toothpaste caused teeth to crumble and fall apart in your mouth. After the water was boiling, it was poured into a plastic dishpan full of dishes in the sink. Then a little cold water was poured in too, so we wouldn't scald our hands. The other dishpan was filled with water too, and the dishes were rinsed in it before being put into the dish drainer. After we'd washed all the dishes, the water was poured into a bucket under the sink, and then we had to dump the old dishwater outside away from the house.

In order to take a bath, we would boil a large pot or two of wash water on the woodstove. These would then be emptied into a 10 gallon bucket which was perched on 2X4s across one end of the bathtub. Cold water was then added until the water was warm. We would wet ourselves sparingly, soap up, and use pitchers to pour just enough water to rinse ourselves off. Two or three pitchers full of water were usually enough for this part of the bathing. Then we would wet our hair, suds it up, and rinse it off the same way except that this used up more water. The bathroom was the coldest room in the house because it had two poorly chinked and uninsulated log walls, so except for the summer we usually shivered the entire time.

The toilet was an adventure too. We used a five gallon plastic bucket and a portable camping toilet seat that fit perfectly over the bucket. Once the bucket had been used for half a day and was beginning to fill, one of the kids had to take it to the wooden box out in the yard, remove the lid from the box, and dump the contents of the bucket, then rinse it with wash water and dump the wash water into the box too. Needless to say, the bathroom stank.

Speaking of the bathroom, that was where our refrigerated foods were kept, too, because it was the coldest room. With no fridge, we kept the milk, butter, and other perishables in coolers with blocks of ice, much as Randy and Vicki Weaver had when we first met them. It was kind of offputting to have our food in the smelly bathroom with a bucketfull of raw sewage, but believe it or not, we did become accustomed to the smell after a while. I mean, you could definitely smell it, but it was a familiar if offensive odor, not one that hit you in the face and shocked you. It was more like we accepted that bathrooms smelled like outhouses.

The worst of living in that house wasn't the bucket of sewage, which we called The Pot, or having to measure every precious drop of water and reuse it until it was truly filthy; it was the dark, dim lighting. Our only light came from a handful of kerosene lamps. Even with two or three lamps clustered together, you had to read with your face right next to the page, but it was rare indeed that anyone actually got that many oil lamps all to themselves, because they were needed for washing the dishes, cooking the food (which required a 2 burner Coleman campstove), and for other people to see what they were doing. The dim, dark light made it difficult to see and lent a depressing atmosphere to a family that already wasn't very happy.

2011-03-11T16:40:00.000-08:00

Due partly to the premise that the neighbors hated us, Eliyah no longer allowed us to stray from the property line of the ten acres we lived on, except with special permission. After the fairly large area (at least a mile in any one direction) we had roamed in Kalispel Bay, this was hard to accept. Also, we weren't to associate with other children in the neighborhood, even though they seemed friendly enough. There was a girl our age, but after only one or two encounters, we weren't able to talk to her again because Eliyah said her father was the one who'd vandalized our house.

At least we still had our animals: Sheba and the three males Bandit, Alaska, and Kodiak, who was still Eliyah's favorite, as well as all of the cats except for Ricotte, of course. When you couldn't trust the people around you and weren't allowed to associate with outsiders, the animals were always there and told no secrets.

While at Mark's house, we had discovered an interesting book on his shelves; Back to Basics detailed country living skills, recipes, wisdom and miscellany. Someone had used it when getting "Words" from Yahweh, and in an effort to get ink to flow out of a dying pen, had made deep scrawling indentations all across the back cover. Our parents bought him a new one, and we kept the original. I devoured this book, thinking foolishly that every word it said was absolute truth. Most of it was fairly accurate, but grounded in idealism while many basic, very necessary details were omitted in an attempt at breadth. It was more of an overview and an inspiration for would be country-dwellers, but we didn't know that yet. After virtually memorizing it (after all, our reading material was extremely limited), I moved on to Mother Earth News magazine,even though it had a lot of pictures of New Agers who lived together without marrying and didn't believe in Yahweh. I read about Scott and Helen Nearing, who believed in reincarnation and had built their own home all by themselves, about Dr. Kubler-Ross and dying and grief.... All sorts of things I hadn't encountered before opened up to me in the pages of TMEN. Because they were Eliyah's magazines and he considered them the manuals for country living, I was allowed to read about people and opinions which I would usually have been insulated from. Even when I rejected what I read because it didn't mesh with our indoctrination, the ideas were still being presented for thought.

I turned sixteen. Although we weren't allowed to have any birthday celebrations, Eliyah bought me a present: sixteen stick of various flavored licorice. Then he sat me down as I ate them and told me that I was old enough to be married now. I should cast aside my wild rough housing and tromping through the woods and climbing trees and prancing around in the rain and the mud. It was time for me to start wearing dresses, fix my hair (which was wild as a horse's mane), start acting ladylike, and learn how to take care of a man and be a good wife. I should spend time learning how to cook and clean and do womanly things instead of running wild like I did in jeans and hiking boots. I listened to this treatise with mixed feelings. I liked who I was; I was truly happy despite all the family stress we were under. I didn't especially care for the idea of becoming like my sister and mother, whom Eliyah held up as paragons of femininity. Would I still be me? I wasn't sure. On the other hand, someone had received a prophecy which stated that I was not to leave the home until I married, and I did like boys. Dating was out of the question; if we were lucky, we would have some sort of real choice in who we married. Maybe if I were feminine and was a great cook, I would be able to catch a man or boy that I really liked. My thoughts drifted to a certain boy in Nordman....

So I tried. I put on skirts more frequently, including a blue prairie style dress we'd pulled from the dumpster. I started listening to Mom when she tried to show me about cooking instead of feigning interest and walking away as soon as I could. I started braiding my hair and even curled it a few times. Of course, I still ran wild through the pasture in that dress, and I still climbed trees.....but I was getting better at rubbing Eliyah's feet, locating his special silverware, and filling his coffee cup before he emptied it.

2011-03-10T16:39:00.000-08:00

We fell into the routine of our new existence; not easily and not without considerable stress, but it did become routine. We gathered mill ends as we always had at the lumber mills, carried them into the house by boxfuls and loaded them into the stove whose metal was so thin and rusted through that you didn't need to open it to see if the fire was still going; you could see through the pinprciked holes in its sides. Loaded empty barrels onto the truck filled, unloaded, sucked siphons, used water and emptied buckets of used water, tipped the barrels that'd lost their siphons to get every remaining drop of water, and put the empty barrels outside to await filling again. Filled the oil lamps, trimmed their wicks, adjusted their flames, cleaned their chimnies. Emptied bucket after reeking bucket of sewage.

Most of our food was made from #10 sized cans of dehydrated food donated to the food bank. When you read old Mother Earth News magazines from the 70's and 80's and see ads for survival food stashes to last through a nuclear holocaust or war or similar crisis, this is what we were eating. It wasn't bad food, it was just different. Soem of it, such as the dried fruit, was fantastic! The main flaw was that nearly all of it required copious amount of water, and in our case, water required gasoline, so we sometimes ran out of water, and therefore could hardly cook anything, either. Let me tell you, you cannot truly appreciate water until you have gone without it, struggled to melt a whole potful of snow down to a meagre inch or two of water, found yourself panicking and desperately thirsty, casting about for anything at all moist to eat.

Winter came and found us unprepared as usual. Raphah stuffed wads of insulation between the logs, per Eliyah's orders. Food was still scarce. Our reserves of firewood were negligible. And, of course, there was still Mom to worry about, because she was pregnant with Baby Eliyah. She was about 5-6 months along, and we kept wondering when she would start to show, but we couldn't mention this. We had to have faith. Dinners were often fairly lean, and Eliyah made certain that Mom got an extra helping because she was "eating for two". We were hungry, but the baby had to eat of course, whether we could see him or not. We did still get occasional food from the food bank. Whenever Eliyah came home with a bag of food from the store or a box from the food bank, we would sing praise songs and hover about excitedly, eager to see every precious package Yahweh had blessed us with. The toilet paper seemed to go especially fast, and then we'd have to improvise with crumpled paper, etc, or Sarah would come up with a roll she'd found. We didn't figure out what was going on until one day, Raphah and I found five or six rolls stuffed away behind the water heater. She'd been taking rolls as soon as we got a new package, and hiding them for lean times, which were yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and next month too.

So we were pretty ecstatic to score about a dozen military issued big rectangular tins of crackers from the county landfill. They were all sealed and clean, if rancid...they were probably twenty years old. Now we could eat whenever we were hungry, even though it was only these old crackers, it was something to put into our stomachs.

We made friends with another family with kids. Doug and Donna Deitz had three kids; a girl and two boys. Donna and my mom became close friends; I don't know if you could say that Eliyah and Doug were good friends or not, but they did stuff together, such as firewood, and then shared the wood. Or to put it more correctly, The two men and most of the kids did the work. Sarah and Rachel frequently didn't do a lot of outside work, and neither did Doug and Donna's little girl, who was about Raphah's age. Sarah and Rachel wore dresses all the time, which meant that their clothes might get messed up if they worked outside, and it made them look more delicate. Also, Rachel had a history of seizures related to a head injury she'd sustained as a toddler, and Sarah had allergies and helped Mom with the cooking and housekeeping. I liked being outside, and I didn't mind manual labor, so Raphah and I spent a lot of time loading, unloading, and stacking wood with Doug and Donna's boys. The firewood was usually mill ends, but sometimes the men would cut down a tree and then we would have to carry sections of log to the house.

Doug and Donna were hippies who'd spent a lot of time living in the country. Unlike us, they knew a lot about goats and chickens and homesteading. Donna was excited that Mom was going to have a baby and they talked about all sorts of boring, womanly things, things I tuned out while reading or going back outside after finding a warm dry set of gloves to replace soggy half frozen ones. Donna sometimes brought us stuff she'd grown in her garden, and then we'd prepare it and everyone would eat together.

We were still eating a lot of lentil soup, and then one night, while our parents were gone and it was all snowy and dark outside, the dogs barked and we heard a knock at the door. It was an official looking guy, so we were immediately suspicious. Through the crack in the door, we saw a bearded guy who actually looked kind of nice. He said his name was Don Carr and he was from the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, which frightened us, but he assured us we weren't in trouble for anything. Then he said. "It's cold out here, can I come in?" We had never allowed a stranger indoors when our parents were gone before, but he said it so disarmingly, and sounded so cold, that we did. He wasn't there long when our parents came back. They didn't scold us for allowed a government agent into the house. In fact, He and Eliyah talked a lot about hunting, and how our family was hungry, but we didn't believe in buying hunting licenses because all the animals belonged to Yahweh, not the State of Idaho. Don Carr said he was OK with that as long as we didn't hunt without a license, and we didn't.

Not long after that night, we got a call from Don Carr. He said a big buck deer had just been hit on the road, and would we like to have the meat? It wasn't even very far away. Dennis drove right out to get it, gutted it, he and mom cut it up and wrapped it, and put it in Mark's freezer. After that we always had venison to eat.

2011-03-09T16:38:00.000-08:00

Although the rent was minimal and we now had roadkill venison to eat along with the oatmeal, lentils, and boxes of apples we'd picked from Steve and Verna's apples, as well as the old army crackers and food bank bread and dehydrated foods, we still needed money for gasoline, other food items, and of course, the rent, slight as it was. Since moving to Idaho, Eliyah had tried a number of "entrepreneurial" schemes, including:
•Rebuilding alternators with child labor
•Making craft items to sell
•Selling Gas Alerts (a gas detection and alarm device)
•Selling handcrafted items made by other people

Eliyah had a lot of construction, roofing, and concrete experience, so he could have gone to work for any of the local construction firms. The trouble was, he was used to being his own boss, a contractor. He preferred going hungry to working under another contractor and taking orders from them. Finally he landed a job of his own, remodeling the Priest Lake Marina so that part of the building was a home for the owners. He and Doug and Raphah all worked on the job, and occasionally I was allowed to go too. On one occasion, he got behind schedule and called the entire family out there to complete the drywall mud and painting before the owners returned. I wound up puttying the ceilings, a job which I grew to hate, because it was disorienting to sit high up on a ladder looking up all the time. Raphah and I also got to nail down subflooring, and when all else failed, I wandered around sweeping and cleaning up after the more experienced workers. I loved the construction work because I felt useful and confident. When we came home, Raphah and I would put on airs that unlike the "girls", we'd been working hard, while all they did was to bake cookies and do girly stuff. We were elated for the chance to escape from the oppressive environment at home.

Also, there was a new prophecy. Mom (or was it Sarah?) has received a prophecy that I was in fact slated to marry Matt Cristson, Don and Helen's son. This was welcome news to me. Matt was tall, intelligent, and funny; a sight better than the rich old men Eliyah kept talking about marrying us off to. There was a catch, though: in order for this to work out, I had to approach him, kneel before him, and recite a prophecy that Mom had received saying something about my being Yerushalayim (Jerusalem) and his promised bride. Although I was definitely motivated, the thought of having to do this made me squirm with exquisite discomfort. I didn't know if I'd be able to. I practiced saying the prophecy over and over while kneeling, and no matter how many times I did it, I still felt awfully weird about the whole thing. Didn't he get any choice in this? What was his reaction to this charade going to be? The more I practiced, the less enthusiastic I became about this idea. Mom told me that there were also certain clothes I needed to wear when I proclaimed this news to Matt. One day she curled my hair, had me wear a tight sweater and the skirt which I'd been prophesied to wear at this time, and had Eliyah drive me to the Christson's house. I did not get out of the truck. Instead, I prayed that if this were really the right thing to do, that Matt would approach me first. He stayed some distance away, chatting with Eliyah and Don. At one point, I heard Eliyah say that his daughter wanted to speak to Matt, but Matt didn't budge. I was oddly relieved, if mildly disappointed in my own lack of nerve. ..

The marina we were remodeling belonged to the parents of Brian, the Vietnamese boy I'd shyly encountered occasionally in the course of my wanderings when we lived at Kalispell Bay. His parents were Christians (a title we'd once embraced and now eschewed) who'd adopted from foreign countries. Brian's sister was from Korea. Brian was good natured, always smiling and joking around and acting goofy. My family hinted that they thought he wasn't that bright, and his parents seemed to shrug it off. I suspected that the clowning around was a distraction rather than the true Brian, but everyone acted as though they didn't really expect much from him.
Eliyah tormented him with our beliefs when his parents were gone and he was left to help us with the construction, grilling him over and over again on the true names Yahweh and Yahshua instead of Lord and Jesus. Brian would give all the right answers back as dutifully as a trained parrot, and without a trace of the irritation or humiliation he must have surely felt. To me, this was a certain sign of his intelligence, because it was just about the only method which would neither inflame nor gratify my step dad, and therefore the least satisfying. Quickly becoming bored with this, Eliyah switched to a trick he played with Raphah all the time. I don't understand exactly how it worked, but here is what I saw: He would ask his helper to plug in a cord. The unsuspecting helper would run to do it, unaware that he had done something to the prongs on the extension cord. When the helper plugged it in, they would yelp as a healthy dose of electricity shocked them because of whatever Eliyah had done to it. Raphah knew how it was done, and got into the habit of inspecting the prongs of the cord carefully before plugging it in to anything even as Eliyah yelled at him to hurry up and just plug it in. Brian got shocked a number of times and simply quit plugging cords in. Eliyah couldn't threaten him, because he had no real power over him. Brian would just refuse and walk off. I envied that...

2011-03-08T16:37:00.000-08:00

One of the new beliefs that had been given to us by Yahweh during the summer was Perfection. Yahweh told us that we had to be perfected. Once we were perfected, we wouldn't sin anymore. To be honest, I never did understand what Perfection was all about. And after we were perfected, we then had to attain High Perfection. There was something about praying and entering another state of consciousness and then entering into the Holy of Holies. I tried as hard as I could to go along with what they said being perfected was all about, but suffice it to say that Mom and Sarah were the first to be perfected, and I was one of the last. There were a lot of prayer formulas that had to be said exactly right, and these too were given to us through prophesies. We were not to marry anyone who hadn't been perfected, or to bring them into our family circle. Everyone in our family or assembly had to be perfected.

Then there were the dreams. Our family took dreams very, very seriously. No dream was meaningless. Every dream we had, had a meaning, and we were to write it down and give it to Mom or Sarah to interpret with their prophetic gifts. We all had special gifts. Mine was supposed to be healing, and Eliyah said that I definitely had healing hands when I rubbed his back, legs, feet, etc. More and more often, massaging him fell to Raphah and I unless he needed to be pounded or walked on, in which case the other girls were also called into service.

It was about this time that Eliyah started pulling me into bed alongside him when I was rubbing his back or legs. He would hold me close against him as he seemed to doze off. I didn't like this, but what I liked even less was that his hands sometimes wandered. I thought of Matt Christson, and I felt disloyal somehow, even though I wanted no part of my stepfather running his hands over the new curves of my body. When I crept away to the safety of my own bed and fell asleep, I sometimes had nightmares.

In one of these nightmares, I was running through snow, fleeing in desperation for my life, and others were too. There were evergreen trees; the land looked a lot like northern Idaho. We who were fleeing could hear dogs who had been sent out to catch us. Some of us tried burrowing into the snow; we couldn't run fast enough to outrun the dogs and soldiers, apparently Nazis, who were pursuing us. The dream switched. We had been caught. We were in the loft of a building with a steeply pitched roof. The leader of the group of Nazi soldiers who had captured us was particularly evil and sadistic. He was forcing the captured prisoners to step off the edge of the loft and fall to their death below as he looked on with relish. There were a couple of soldiers upstairs with us, forcing us to the edge of the loft, one by one. We all had to watch as the other fell and died. Suddenly, a blond male captive leapt to one of the nearby soldiers, attacked him, took his gun, and shot all the soldiers upstairs, then went after the evil man below with the fancy uniform. I don't remember how the dream ended, because I think it ended there. What I do remember is that I woke up towards the end of the horror, and it continued even though I was awake, with my heart pounding in my throat. That it continued after awakening made it seem even more real, and my dreams have always been particularly vivid anyway, with color, taste, smells, textures, etc.

I wasn't sure how to interpret this dream. Was this an event to come? Were there going to be more Nazis searching out people like us to kill? When we talked to the Weavers and the Christsons, we all agreed that the end was imminent. Was this the sort of thing that would happen with the New World Order or the Illuminati? What I did know was that I'd been having nightmares with firing squads and Nazis since I was seven or eight, long before I'd heard about the Holocaust. It was creepy and disturbing.

During this time period, the winter of 1988-1989, the house was really cold, and between gathering firewood and taking care of the daily chores, we didn't have as much free time as one might think, even though we were not attending school. We were supposed to keep a daily journal of anything that could possibly be called schoolwork, including firewood, cooking, and other tasks that could be attributed to an integrated curriculum. Mom had bought the set of McGuffy Readers, and I worked through the third and started in on the fourth. They were surprisingly difficult, but it could have been the difference in style compared to what we were used to. The readers had a lot of moralistic stories, including one about a son who was so incredibly obedient that he stayed on a burning ship because his father had told him to stay put, even as several people came by to rescue him. He drowned, to the great grief of his father, who both praised and lamented the boy's slavish obedience. I didn't like that story. It seemed to me that it put blind obedience above basic common sense, and yet the reader heralded this boy as some sort of hero to emulate for his fine character! We still had the Mennonite curriculum workbooks to go through, and sometimes we could even check books out at the library in Coolin, which was placed conveniently near the Post Office. I began reading all the the James Herriot books. They were so humorous and interesting! Then I checked out all of the Foxfire books they had, and learned about how people in Poor rural Appalachia lived. The plants were different there, as were the habits of the people, but in many ways, their rustic lifestyle was not terribly different from our own. It was such a relief and a pleasure to have new reading material, and I devoured these books eagerly.

Here is a journal from January, 1989 (a time period we have yet to reach in this tale):

Rebekah's Journal, Januray

1.Finished third reader (this would be the 3rd McGuffy Reader)
2.Planted pumpkin seeds
3.Planted squash seeds
4.Made comfrey ointment
5.Made aromatic oils
6.Tanned deer skins
7.Practiced calligraphy
8.Handwriting and composition
9.Wrote a poem
10.Made ink and wrote 23rd psalm with a homemade pen
11.Did two drawings, both difficult
12.Made a candle
13.Split wood
14.Gathered myrrh (someone had told me, erroneously, that the resin of Abies grandis was myrrh)
15.Made tomato bread
16.Read Joni
17.Did outline
18.Learned to set a digital watch (!)
19.Learned about hoes, the worst kind, and how to use a hoe.
20.Learned to putty screw holes and around electrical outlets
21.Painted a picture
22.Cut down a tree
23.2nd month, made a fur hat (we weren't allowed to use the word “February”, but the difficulty in adopting these rules can be seen in my error of calling the first month “January”).

Notice, dear reader, that while I did a lot of art, reading, some writing, and quite a bit of work which is not adequately reflected in that list (because even if I puttied entire rooms, I could only list that once), math of any kind is conspicuously absent. I had an algebra book. I wanted to learn it, and so I studied it on my own and did the homework, which of course was never graded or looked at. At some point, though, I had some question or difficulty and made the mistake of going to my parents for help. Mom didn't remember algebra anymore, and we got into some kind of disagreement over doing the problem the way the book said to. So I took it to Eliyah; he wouldn't help me, either, and was amused that I was even trying to do it. He told me that I was wasting my time, because I was never going to need to know this math. I was only going to be a wife and mother, and my time would be better spent in learning the womanly arts of homemaking, which of course bored me to death. The thing of it was, I wanted to learn it, but since he had more or less ordered me not to study it anymore and told me that I obviously had too much time on my hands and needed to work harder, I put the book away.

We also all made or did things in order to earn money from one another and called our products or services shoppes or stores. I had painted a stained glass type watercolor of a grey horse and called my shop “Ye Olde Dapple Grey” and sold handmade and wildcrafted items. Since we could not buy craft or art supplies, whatever things I did not already have had to be foraged for, scrounged, or recycled from things we would have thrown away. For example, my candles were made of wax drippings, candle scraps, old crayons and pieces of oil lamp wicks that were too short to use which were cut lengthwise into narrower strips and the candles were molded in tomato paste cans.

Sarah had “Sarah's Sewing Shoppe” and would mend your clothes or make small handsewn items. Rachel had “Rachel's Candy Store” which sold small pieces of candy. Raphah had “Raphah's Fix-it shop” and he would repair things for you. We had so little money that most of the things we made or did were incredibly cheap. Sarah mended clothes for pennies. My most expensive items may have cost a dollar, and it wasn't uncommon for us to sell good or services for two or three pennies. Money was so scarce that it had acquired a much higher value for us than it held in the outside world. When we received $10.00 in birthday or holiday money from a relative, we felt as though we were rich, and would hide the money away carefully and save it until Eliyah forced us to hand it over. He always said he was borrowing it, but we hardly ever saw it come back to us. We kept careful records of exactly how much he'd borrowed from us anyway, just in case.

2011-03-07T16:36:00.000-08:00

Bandit, Alaska, and Kodiak had matured into lanky half grown dogs; they were almost at their full adult height but hadn't filled out their frames yet. They all had to live on chains, because when they were loose, they might come in the house, and Eliyah did not allow animals of any kind in the house. Also, they often ran off and didn't return for hours. Kodiak, the most dominant pup in the litter, was easy going, friendly, and fairly quiet. He had a habit of smiling when we stopped to spend time with him. Alaska jumped and yapped constantly and had the same narrow frame and head he'd always had. Bandit was just as bad. I simply could not control him. He was always friendly to me, but the minute I left him and went into the house, he'd start barking obnoxiously, relentlessly. My parents told me that I had to discipline him since he was my dog, and told me to hit him with a stick. I beat my dog until his muzzle bled, and still he barked whenever I left him. I felt horrible about it and powerless to make him shut up, and still they yelled at me whenever he barked.

Our neighbor kept laying hens, and he complained that dogs were getting into his henhouse. On one occasion, we had kept Sheba indoors that night, yet the neighbor swore up and down that he had seen her killing his hens. Black dogs are fairly generic, especially in poor light, and Sheba had no distinctive markings. The culprit could have been a black lab, or any black dog, but our dogs were nearby, and they were in the habit of running, so they got blamed first. One day all of the dogs ran off. When Sheba returned, she was a mess- looked like she'd been into a fight. And, she was pregnant again. We wondered if she'd been bred by coyotes; there was simply no way to know what the sire was, which would make finding homes for them that much more difficult.

There were hordes of cats, none of them mine. Coco and Muffin had kittens at a steady pace. Coco's were always strong, beautiful, and healthy while Muffin's tended to be sickly and lackluster. Mom had gotten a Siamese male, Alexander, and he and Coco (who was part Siamese herself) had strikingly gorgeous kittens that found homes easily.

2011-03-06T16:35:00.000-08:00

Dennis had somehow finagled a deal in which he got a lot of reject shingles and scrap wood from a cedar shake mill up in Nordman. Some of the wood we'd loaded up hadn't ever been cut into shingles and was still in log round (length of log ready to be split for firewood) form. The cedar made wonderful kindling, and it was easy to split.

I watched one day as Raphah split one log after another. It looked like a lot of fun. I asked him if I could try.

"You're just a stupid girl! You can't split wood!", he guffawed.

At first my pride was hurt. I was not a stupid girl. I was just a good as he was. Besides, he was half my size. I was certain I could do it. Besides, he'd just told me I couldn't, and I had to prove the little brat wrong. He bent to gather up an armful of cedar kindling and I snatched the maul. It was only a 6#, but at the time I didn't know the difference.

"You can't use that! You'll wreck it! Dad doesn't want you to use it! You can't split wood!" he screamed. "You're too stupid to know how to do it!"

Ah, but I wasn't. I'd read those Mother Earth News magazines, including an article which detailed the fine art of woodsplitting. I had a pretty good idea of how to do it, even though I had never done so. But I was mad, so I didn't even answer him. I just stood up a cedar round on end and stepped back. The maul jerked up and to the right and then down towards the log and lodged into the ground next to it. Raphah laughed and jeered. I gritted my teeth and took another swing and missed again while he continued to insult me. After a number of swings, I did hit the log, but it didn't split. My aim was getting better, though. After about fifteen minutes of trying, the maul connected with the round face of the wood and split it. A rush of exhiliration and victory flooded my senses. I split more rounds of cedar even as Raphah complained that I wasn't leaving him any. Then I went back into the house and read that Mother Earth News article again, a little more intently.

By the time winter was fully upon us, I was using the 8# maul (in fact, Raphah and I fought over it, because an 8 splits so much more effectively than a 6) and I was splitting wood for hours every day. I didn't have to stand by and wait for it to be split by a man or boy so that I could stack it anymore. That was Rachel and Sarah's job, and i made sure to let them know that I wasn't a girl like them. I could do real work, like splitting wood. They didn't seem to care one way or the other, but it was a huge ego boost for me. I loved the smell of the wood, the satisfying pop of a round of wood (and not just cedar!) halving on the first blow, the striations of color inside the wood, knowing that I was the first person to ever see that wood or to open those pitch pockets. Also, I loved being able to do outside work instead of being cooped up in the house doing endless and repetitive chores. When I split wood, I had something to show for it at the end of the day. If I did the dishes, the sinks were only clean for half an hour. I couldn't even see the floor unless I got down on my hands and knees, so sweeping was even less rewarding. When I split wood, it was work, but I was deeply happy and satisfied doing it.

2010-09-03T16:35:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I had to stay up into the night rubbing Eliyah's smelly feet , massaging his calves, tiring, resting for a moment (at which point he would nudge/kick me to resume my work), I would make the task more bearable by pretending that I had a husband that I really loved, and I was rubbing his feet and legs. I told myself that even though I was taking care of Eliyah right now, one day it would be the man Yahweh had chosen for me from the day of my conception, my beshert. Then I didn't mind it so much, and Eliyah would sigh contentedly, "That's it, Bucky (his nickname for me), why can't you do it like that more often"? And I would wish he would shut up so that I could go back to imagining what sort of husband I might get, and how well I would take care of him.

2010-09-02T16:34:00.000-07:00

Splitting wood gave me a lot more time outdoors and away from the drama indoors. Things were just...weird in there. I still had to come in at night, but I was perfectly content to split wood all day long and do the outdoor stuff, even dumping the pot. When I did come inside, Mom was mad at me for "being lazy and rebellious" and "not doing my chores". Which is to say, she wanted me to do as much housework as the other girls did, as though I were one of them, even though I'd already put in hours of work and was now tired. It felt acutely unjust that she called me lazy when all the other girls did was basic housework and making cookies. So, sure, frying cookies in a frying pan because you have no oven is a little more time consuming than baking them, but still, they were making cookies, which seemed recreational to me.

Also, I wanted to have faith and to be righteous in Yahweh's eyes, but the constantly changing nature of the daily prophecies and dream interpretations made me uneasy. Every single detail in a dream meant something. You dreamt that you picked up three red apples from the ground? That was bad, because the Evil One, Satan, was commonly depicted as red, and 3 was an evil number, so such a dream would indicate that you were willingly partaking of Satan's fruit, and repentence and a multitude of prayers were in order. They might even have whole-family prayers with the offending dreamer sitting in the center as everyone else laid hands on him or her and prayed for them to resist Satan's temptation and to open their heart to Yahweh once more. I tended to think that the dream should be thought of as a whole rather than picking it down to the tiniest details and drawing conclusions based on those.

And there was other stuff that I found unnerving, too, like the time Mom said she saw an alien looking through the glass of the front door at her. We were all standing right there with her, and none of us saw an alien even though we'd also been looking at the door. But the more we looked at the front door and the window overlooking the sink, the more apprehensive we were of seeing that alien. She said it'd been an evil spirit sent to make her ill, and ill she became, immediately. She was bedridden for a couple of days. Occasionally Raphah and I would question this stuff together when we were outside, but we were terribly afraid Yahweh might hear us doubting. My eyes weren't getting any better. Mom was almost due to deliver Baby Eliyah, but she wasn't any plumper than one might expect of any woman who was eating for two. More and more words were forbidden in our daily speech, including some that were in the Scriptures. We had spent hour after hour writing the sacred names down on plain white address labels in teeny, tiny print, and cutting them out and sticking them over the words, "God", "Lord", and "Jesus" in our bibles, only to find that words such as "wonderful" were also evil, and there was often no adequate substitution to paste over them.

We'd all been sewing baby clothes and mentally preparing for Baby Eliyah. We couldn't wait to meet our new baby brother, and the thought of the great prophet Eliyah made small and coming to live in our family was humbling and awe inspiring. Mom's due date came. She announced one evening that she was going to have the baby that night, and calmly strode into her room with clean rags and gallons of water. We all listened expectantly throughout the night, but we knew that we had to have faith. Maybe since it was the prophet Eliyah, his birth wouldn't be painful at all. In the morning, Mom emerged from her room as we met her eagerly. She proclaimed that the prophecy regarding Baby Eliyah was false, it had been sent to us by Satan to deceive us. She would still give birth to Baby Eliyah, but the timing was totally off. We looked at one another questioningly, but we knew- we must not doubt.

The tension in our family was always as unrelenting as it had always been, except that over time, it went from being just Eliyah to Mom as well. The house was dim and dark, which didn't help her frequently depressed mood at all. Still, it was Eliyah who we had to watch out for. No one wanted to sit next to him at meals. We actually fought and bickered over who would get to sit at Mom's end of the table until she came up with a rotating turn system. If we got stuck sitting next to Eliyah, the meal turned into an ordeal, which is to say, even more of an ordeal than meals already were with him at the table. If you had a dessert or anything nice, you had to eat it first, before he finished his. Otherwise, he'd take it right off of your plate. If you betrayed an aversion to food, he'd force you to eat it. And even if what you were eating was plain and basic, such as lentil soup, he might suddenly dump a lot of hot sauce into your bowl and then force you to eat it. Or maybe he would seem to have forgotten the victims sitting next to him, and they'd be lulled into an uneasy sense of almost-safety, right before he jabbed a toothpick into them. And of course, he consistently got two or three times as much food as anyone else, and special foods we didn't get, despite the high-grading of what meager niceties were on our plates.

2010-09-01T16:33:00.000-07:00

Sabbaths were a mixed blessing. On one hand, we didn't have to do any work other than what was necessary to get through the day. On the other hand, Dad was bored and we were more or less confined to the house, a bad combination. Of course, even on Sabbaths, we weren't exempt from rubbing his back, feet, legs, hands, etc. The usual Sabbath routine was to get up and dressed, empty the pot and wash water buckets, eat breakfast, and start our service. To begin with, Mom or Dad would pray. Then we would play a song on a tape from one of the Assemblies of Yahweh in the midwest. The radio worked because it was wired to a car battery. The song was a direct quote of one of the psalms, "Make a joyful noise unto Yahweh, all ye, all ye lands...". Usually Mom played it more than once, and we would all sing along. Often she played it four times, because 4 was a good number, unlike 3 or 5. Once she played it 7 or 8 times in a row, and we had to sing along each time, until I thought I would scream if I ever had to sing that song again! We sang other songs, too, but we always sang that one first, and often ended with it, too. Then she would read prophecies and she would lay out which scriptures Yahweh had told her to have us read that week, and we would take turns reading the verses. She would give her interpretations. Dad would lecture. He always liked Malachi and Isaiah and doom and gloom readings from the prophets that cursed Egypt and Babylon. Whenever a verse talked about Jerusalem, it was understood that this was talking about Mom. She was the physical embodiment of Jerusalem. She would be humbled and cry in the places where it said Jerusalem was an unfaithful wife. After an hour or two or more of this, or however long it took to read and discuss the readings, we would sing more songs and then eat lunch. Then, if we were lucky, we would get to retreat to our rooms and read our bibles or write prayers. If we were very, very lucky, we might get to take a nap. Usually, though, Dad wanted a nap, and it was our job to massage him and lull him to sleep. If we were unlucky, Mom would have "words" from Yahweh regarding the spiritual weaknesses of each (or specific) member of the family and everyone would sit and discuss this person's poor character and exhort them to be more righteous, and Dad would lecture and insult and preach at them about their failings.

I was rebellious because I thought my own thoughts, and "did my own thing" and everyone knew Yahweh frowned on that. I needed to open my heart to Yahweh's thoughts. Sarah was worldly because she cared too much about the outside world and her appearances. She should heed the example of Dinah, who was interested in the ways of the world and got raped and defiled by gentiles as a result. I should be more like my sister, feminine and interested in being a good wife someday. She should be more like me, hard working and not afraid to get her hands dirty, not so dainty. And so on, for each and every one of us. Dad often had Sarah sit on his lap as he made these comparisons. She was "his princess Sarah". I see now that she was being groomed, but at the time, I felt only a deep sense of shame for being who I was, a helplessness at not being able to be just like her, and a simmering resentment. Against her, because she was almost perfect and was constantly held before me as what I should be like, and against them for successfully driving a wedge between my sister and I, and for not loving me for who I really was.

The Fridays (we called it the sixth day) were always highly stressful. Mom had us run around in a frenzy of cleaning and preparation for Sabbath. It didn't end until the sun went down, and then we all breathed a sigh of relief.

2010-08-10T16:32:00.000-07:00

One night, the dogs barked too much, and Dad got fed up. He loaded the three male dogs into the truck and drove a long way away, and left them on the side of the road. I worried about what would become of them, but as it turned out, the dogs were smarter than we'd given them credit for. Over the next day or two, everyone was upset about what he'd done. Then he went driving to Priest Lake one day and the dogs heard his truck and met it alongside the road, Kodiak in the lead, grinning and wagging his tail. He brought them back. Meanwhile, Sheba had her puppies. Doug and Donna picked a pretty tricolored female, named her Princess, and took her home at 4 weeks old. We named and trained the rest as I always had, by tossing nuggets of dog food and training the puppies to catch the food in mid air, and then tossing it only to the puppies who sat down on command, and most of them found homes. Two did not, Happy and Shy, both males, both almost solid black, both named for their dispositions. I loved Shy; he never caused any trouble, and I enjoyed earning his trust rather than simply having it handed to me. Happy's enthusiasm for life was infectious. They were both good dogs. When Happy and Shy were a few months old, all the adult dogs went running off as they often did. They didn't come back. I hoped they'd find a way back as they had before, but we never saw them again. Now it was just Happy and Shy, and after a while, Shy found a home and then it was just Happy.

The gap in our dog population was quickly filled, though. Dad was driving one day when he saw a dog wandering alongside the highway, a black Cocker Spaniel. It looked lost, so he brought him home. As soon as he brought the dog home, it promptly pooped on the floor. Dad announced that whoever cleaned the poop up could have the dog. I didn't any pets now, and no one else wanted to clean up the poop, so I promptly cleaned up the mess and claimed my new dog. I called him Curly. Curly was sort of irritable. He acted as though he wasn't used to being in a family with children. If you touched him near his rear end, he'd growl. He needed a companion, and so did I. It didn't take me very much work or time with him before he was friendly and calm with me. He and Happy became the best of friends. They'd romp around in the snow, Curly grabbing Happy's long tail, and Happy glomming onto Curly's long ears, as his tail had been docked. Curly turned from a crotchety old dog into a relaxed, pleasant, family dog. The change in him was so dramatic that we decided to change his name to Sonny. Sonny was allowed to stay indoors at night, because he seemed less hardy than Happy and the other dogs we'd had. Even Dad liked him.

2010-08-09T16:31:00.000-07:00

Have I mentioned how cold that house was in the winter? The bathtub was freezing, icy cold, and not being able to immerse ourselves in hot water meant that we shivered all the way through the sponge bath. Because water was so limited, baths were in demand. Because it was so incredibly cold in there, Raphah and I gladly deferred to others who wanted a bath, if we could get away with it. Even after you got out and stood by the woodstove, it was still cold. If you turned your back to the stove, your front got cold, and vice versa. We hardly ever went anywhere anyway, but it is still a little shocking to recall times when he or I took a bath once a month, or even less often.

There were exceptions, however. Rachel had a nasty habit of neglecting to empty the pot, even when asked. By the time she complied, it would be pretty full, and then she'd complain that it was too heavy for her to dump, which it was by then. This aggravated Raphah and I, since we were the ones who inevitably had to take up the slack, but there was no point in complaining. She was the baby of the family, and she acted so innocent about it.

On one such occasion, she had allowed the pot to fill right up to the rim. Mom asked me to dump it. I griped and pointed out that if she'd emptied it several times, starting in mid morning, this would never happen, and that the overly full bucket, only on her days, was beginning to seem like a pattern, but it was no use arguing. The pot was full and somebody, me, had to dump it. By now it was dark, but the light of the moon shone on the snow, so I didn't need a flashlight. I was so used to not seeing things that visibility didn't matter that much anyway.

I held the pot gingerly away from my body and walked slowly, smoothly, carefully, out the door, so as not to slosh any of it on myself. The slightest bump would send it splashing out. Down the front steps, no spills, no sloshing. Suddenly my left foot hit an unexpected patch of ice! I went down, the bucket went up, and the contents came down- all over me. I must have wailed, because the front door opened quickly, and the whole family appeared at the doorway. I was covered in sewage. It was splattered on my glasses, on my face, soppy toilet paper hung from my hair...it was horrible beyond words. My clothes were soaked through with the stinking mess. Rachel pushed between the others, caught sight of me and began laughing hysterically. The others looked absolutely horrified and awestruck. Dad told me I had to strip down, right there in front of the house, in the snow, and leave my clothes outside. Kettles of water were put on to boil. Someone must have shoveled up the mess. I washed, and washed, and scrubbed and lathered, and I still felt contaminated. I shampooed my hair four times in a row and felt as though I would never be truly clean again. After that, when it was Rachel's day for the pot, I got onto her case early in the day. I didn't ever want to experience anything like that again.

2010-08-08T16:31:00.000-07:00

Christmas came and went as though it didn't exist, except that my Father and Marie sent Sarah and I gold necklaces with pendants. The pendants were stars of David. In the center of the star was a cross. They were beautiful and I loved my necklace, but Mom didn't like the crosses; crosses were evil pagan symbols. She told us to call our Father and complain about his gifts, to see if he could send us some without the crosses. I hated making that phone call. She stood nearby and wrote stuff down that we had to say. Finally he told us to send the necklaces back to him; we did. Mom told me that it was just as well, because gold wasn't my color anyway. I was only allowed to wear things that were silver in color. I felt sickened about the rejected gifts. I knew it must have hurt his feelings. Mom made us write letters to our entire family begging them not to send us presents for our birthdays or Christmas and frankly, after this incident, it wasn't hard to do.

We had very few clothes, and what we did have tended to be in bad condition, especially if the clothes were used to work outside in. My jeans were consistently wearing out at the knees and thighs (from lifting rounds of firewood onto my thighs to get them up to torso/chest height to carry). We had limited winter clothing, and now that winter had come, riding in the back of the truck had become quite the chilling experience, especially when we hauled water. The barrels would slosh any water from their rims onto us, and we didn't have blankets to protect us from the wind, either. Socks and underwear were limited commodities, and the flannel shirts i worked in....well, they were worn to the point of being the thickness of toilet paper.

I mean, we coped with these obstacles. When we worked outside, we routinely wore long underwear, two or three pairs of socks, and two pairs of jeans, and long underwear, flannel shirts, a wool sweater or sweatshirt under our coats. The only gloves we had were work gloves, the cotton type with black rubber dots on the palm side. When we working in the slush or the rain or worst of all, freezing rain, the gloves were nearly worthless, useful only for keeping splinters and abrasions at bay. Most of the gloves had holes in the fingertips, but they were still better than nothing at all. I was lucky to have the same pair of thin leather gloves (I think they were for golfing or riding?) I'd neglected to wear for my journey out the 2nd floor window via a rope. Their smooth surface didn't collect snow and slush. They weren't very warm, but they were better than what Dad called the "dot gloves".

Grandma Amy sent us new clothes sometimes. We went absolutely wild over her care packages. Other than that, our main sources of clothing were hand me downs from other people and the Coolin landfill. We scoured the dump every time we got to go. Raphah and I were sorely disappointed when Dad wouldn't take us. If he did take us, we had to repay it by picking up 26 aluminum cans, which was his estimation of compensation for the gas.

Once we were there looking for anything good when a car drove up. The guy inside it opened a door, unloaded several cats, and sped off. Some of them tried to run after his vehicle. I couldn't believe anyone would do such a thing, and Eliyah seemed upset over it too. We caught two of the cats and I went calling another one, but it ran into the woods and I couldn't get it. The two we brought back were both long haired tabbies, a male and female, and the female, Colette, became mine. The other....I can't remember his name so I'll call him Romeo, was more of a family cat. Colette was extremely affectionate and had bewitching green eyes. She had this habit of sashaying up to me, gazing up lovingly, and meowing with all the charm in the world right before digging her claws in and climbing up my leg. It was lucky that I wore the 3+ layers of clothing (which also was a good defense against toothpicks)! She'd ride on my shoulders once she'd ascended my body. I probably should have discouraged her, but really did not mind very much. I finally had a cat again.

Although Verna remained puzzled by what had become of the baby Mom was supposed to have (this was a recurring and embarrassing question put to us by other people, that we did not know how to answer), she contacted her niece about the kids in our family and our clothing situation. It seems that her niece had some sort of access to free clothing that was brand new and hadn't sold, or something like that. We were absolutely stunned when we received two huge freight boxes packed solidly with clothing for us. Nothing like this had ever happened to us before. We were used to picking through the landfill, and would have been delighted with a trip to a thrift store with a dollar or two for each child to spend. To receive this much nice, new clothing was truly surreal. It was so surreal that Yahweh quickly informed us that he would help us decide who got what. It took us days to go through all that clothing. The funny thing of it was, there was almost no clothing at all for Dad. Yahweh said that this was some sort of an indication of Dad's devotion, or lack of it, and our persistence in hoping and praying for clothing. Even now, this strikes me as terribly funny and accurate.

2010-08-07T16:29:00.000-07:00

Even in "normal" times, life was tenuous at our house. We regularly ran out of necessary items, such as water, or key food ingredients, or firewood. I'd copied a lot of recipes from the Great Depression cookbook (from the library) which included creative substitutions for things we ran out of a lot. For whatever reason (poor planning comes to mind) we were constantly living on the edge, especially now that the job at the marina was finished and Dad hadn't been paid for the balance of the work (according to him- I have no idea what actually happened). Even in an average winter, that cabin was cold. You could look between the logs to see who had pulled up in the driveway, and the wind whistled right through the house. We consumed a huge box of mill ends every day just to keep the house tolerably warm.

So we were sitting ducks when the winter storm from hell, the worst I have ever seen, hit us. We didn't usually listen to the radio, so we had no warning when it struck and we were woefully unprepared. The temperature dropped to at least -35 degrees F, and there were 40 mph winds. Raphah and I consulted the wind chill graph on our Forest Service map. It didn't go down that far. The nearest figure we could find put the wind chill factor at 80 below. Everyone moved out of their bedrooms and clustered their beds in the living room, sealing off the bedroom doors to consolidate what heat we had. We spent all day long huddled right next to the stove. The water in the barrels froze, so we moved one of them close to the stove. For once, the pot didn't smell at all- because it was frozen.

At night, some of the kids, including Sarah, slept with Mom and Dad. I got sick and tired of being cold. Even with two pairs of long johns, 2 pairs of socks and a sweat suit, I was still cold at night. So I slid one sleeping bag into another to make it double, laid several blankets on top of my mattress, then the sleeping bags, and more blankets, and tucked all the blankets in tightly. Dad said that I was a dirty pig to sleep like that without sheets; I didn't care. I was warm and they were still whining. We turned the radio on now, and heard that in Priest River, they were using one of the schools as an emergency shelter. I said I thought we should go to it. Dennis sneered at me and said we didn't need help, we would survive. Stuff like that was for city people, not us.

The storm raged on, knocking trees over like toothpicks. The truck was so cold it wouldn't start. We had no idea if the roads would have been passable even if the truck would start. And in the middle of all this, we ran out of firewood. It was the worst possible thing we could have run out of. It it hadn't been for the tree that had been blown down onto the Airstream trailer right next to our house, we might not have made it. We couldn't have driven anywhere and we had no phone. As it was, we still had the problem of getting the tree cut and split and brought into the house. It was a fairly tall, small diameter tree, the type that has minimal limbs for most of its length, which was good; it wouldn't need to be limbed or split much.

We all (except for Mom) bundled up as warmly as we could. I put on layer after layer of clothing and my Polaris snowmobile coat, and then we stepped out the door. The wind almost blew us over and cut right through our multi-layered clothes as though we were naked. Staying upright took a lot of effort. Walking took even more. This was cold as we had never experienced it before. Snow was blowing all over the place, making visibility difficult. Eliyah started cutting the tree into rounds, and we struggled to carry the logs to the house. It was hard to see where we were going, and it was mind numbingly cold. Our gloves were frozen in no time, and the house seemed like an oasis of warmth. Mom was thankful for the first log or two we brought in. After that, she got mad at us when we came in to warm up for a minute, or to trade out our gloves for warm ones, saying that we were making the house cold every time we opened up the door. Every trip to and from the tree to the house seemed like an incredible effort, and the longer we were out there, the harder it became. We had moved a lot of it when I went in to change out my gloves and thaw out. It seemed that even a few seconds of warmth would help. Mom screamed at me and told me I was making the house cold, to get out. Rachel was inside by now, helping to make cookies, but I was not welcome in there, and no, I couldn't have a cookie. She wouldn't let me change my gloves out, either. I stumbled back outside, infuriated with her keeping warm from our labor and not even allowing us to get warm or have dry gloves. Barely able to keep my footing against the wind, hauling the wood back and forth began to seem like some kind of a surreal nightmare. And I was so sleepy, so tired. Stumbling back from the house, I saw a patch of soft snow. It looked so inviting. Yes. I would just lay down for a few minutes and rest. I curled up into the snow as the anger melted away. I wasn't even cold anymore. I was warm, contented, and I drifted off. Sarah came by and bothered me, told me the work was done. I didn't care. She told me to come into the house. I told her I was fine, Mom told me not to come inside, and the snow was warm, I was OK. Luckily, she didn't leave me there. She probably thought I was crazy to try to go to sleep in the snow, but she was used to her sister doing weird things. She kept at me until she got me into the house.

I thawed out. My skin was red and and so itchy; no, the muscle itself itched horribly. We made it through that storm, but my respect and trust in my mother never quite recovered..

After the storm, Mom and Dad's bed stayed in the living room where they'd moved it to be closer to the stove. Raphah and Sarah moved in to the cedar bedroom. It was still too cold for anyone to inhabit the other bedroom, but eventually, Rachel and I moved into there, with me on the top bunk and Rachel on the lower one.

There was still snow, but spring was just around the corner and our spirits improved. I started planting garden seeds that we'd gotten from the food bank in pots. I had no experience in gardening; my only sources were Back to Basics and the wealth of Mother Earth News magazines we had. Consequently, I started seedlings that spring which I have never grown since in pots, such as soybeans and bush beans. When we ate grapefruits one evening, I noticed that one of the seeds had a root. I planted it, and soon there was a sturdy, slender green sprout thrusting its way into the world, full of hope. I was hooked. From then on I bugged everyone I knew for seeds and considered it some kind of plant murder to throw them away when they could be planted instead.

Also, I was drawing and painting again, having recovered from the incident at Priest Lake where Mom went through my sketchbook, telling me which drawings were demonic and had to be ripped out and burned. I had lost almost half my work, and she had an unpleasant habit of criticizing the rest of it, telling me how she thought it should be. I never understood why she didn't just make her own drawings. Now, however, she spent a lot more time talking to Yahweh, writing down prophecies and dream interpretations, and singing songs he had taught her. When she wasn't doing that, there were the basics of daily survival to attend to.

2010-08-06T16:28:00.000-07:00

We began to acquire more animals. First Doug and Donna gave us a goat, our first doe (female goat). Della was a French Alpine, cou blanc (white shoulders, black hindquarters) in color. They said she had scoliosis, and she certainly looked that way. Her back was arched rather than being anywhere close to level, and her rear legs were thin and feeble. Her front end had become powerfully muscular to compensate her rear legs, but even so, she would often sway and collapse as she walked, because her legs would give out on her. She was a cull and should have been eaten, but we knew nothing about livestock, so she became a pet, Sarah's first goat of her own. Della was strong willed, bossy, obstinate and difficult in spite of her handicap. If you tried to lead her somewhere she'd rather not go, she'd pull you as hard as she could, or fall over and then try to wobble off without you. My low opinion of goats was not helped at all by knowing her, but Sarah adored Della and soothed her patiently every time she fell down, and waited for her to get up again.

We looked in the Nickel's Worth, the local free advertising paper, every week for free horses, free llamas, and other animals, even dogs. Dad was pretty adamant about not getting any more dogs or cats. One day we saw a free goat advertised, and Raphah had Dad call about it. To our surprise, the goat was still available, and before we knew it, Dad and Mom were unloading her from the truck! Penny was coppery-brown colored, a Nubian with long, pendulous ears like a hound dog. She was adorable! I'd had no idea that goats could actually be attractive, but this one was; I was actually jealous of this goat. The grass was beginning to emerge now, and every day Sarah and Raphah tied the goats out in the pasture.

Goats were OK, but I still wanted a horse. Or maybe a sheep. Baby lambs were so cute! I looked every week, but there were never any free lambs. There weren't even any for the price of the money Dad had "borrowed" from me, $25. I read every article and book I could find about sheep, and went back and read the Herriot books again. Yes, sheep were definitely what I wanted. I reserached the different breeds....pretty soon, sheep and gardening were more or less the only things I ever talked about.

2010-08-05T16:27:00.000-07:00

After weeks of hearing me chatter non-stop about sheep, Eliyah got a bright idea: he called up our old friends Bonnie and Lowell in Naples, who raised sheep. Sure enough, they had a small ewe lamb that had been rejected by its own mother and was getting along in life by nursing other ewes when she could get away with it before she was butted away. It was a Corriedale Polypay cross. Corriedales were a breed I'd been interested in; I hadn't heard of Polypays before. At any rate, she was free, it was a ewe, and she was going to be mine! I was ecstatic. We drove up to Naples and got the lamb. I asked Lowell every conceivable question I could think of, including what sort of pen to build for her. Dad asked if we could tie her out- Lowell looked shocked and said she was much too young and small for that yet. I held Lamby in my lap as we drove home. She was so tiny, about the size of a cat. Her body was covered in tight white ringlets. I ran my hand lovingly over her wrinkled body and parted the tightly curled wool, and was appalled to discover that she was absolutely covered with ticks! There weren't just a few of them, there were probably hundreds. I started picking them off of her, but it was clearly a task that would take hours to complete.

Strangely enough, we hadn't thought of what to feed her or how to feed her until we got home. All we had was cow milk from the store and I didn't realize it then, but store milk will give lambs scours, especially if you don't know what you're doing. We didn't have a bottle, either, only a turkey baster. Dad told me she would have to learn to drink from a bowl, but despite my best efforts, she did not. I knew that the milk should be warmed for her, having read that cold milk causes scours. I wasn't very experienced with our Coleman camp stove and kept scalding the milk. I tried sucking the milk up into a turkey baster and feeding it to her that way. As soon as she felt the hard plastic tip of the baster in her mouth, she'd turn her head away abruptly and despondently. I wished we had a bottle, any kind of bottle, like the one we'd used for Cisco. Mom and Dad both said that when she got hungry enough, she'd eat, but it certainly didn't seem that way.

I struggled to get her to eat for the next several days. Mom said that I was neglecting her, because she needed to be fed every three hours, even at night, just like a human baby. The thing of it was, I could hardly get her to eat at all. Donna, who had a lot of experience with goat kids, came over and tried to help me. She held Lamby expertly and got a little bit of the milk into her mouth, but quickly informed us that the turkey baster just was not going to work. We needed the kind of black rubber nipple that fits over a glass pop bottle. They only cost .35 to .50, but Dad wouldn't buy one. He said she just wasn't hungry enough yet. Donna also mentioned that if we got a goat, maybe Lamby would nurse from the goat. If not, the goat milk would be better for her. Already she had developed the typical foul smelling yellow diarrhea that characterizes scours. Lamby's personality had gone downhill, too. She seemed lackluster and spiritless. Desperate, I went through the Nickel's Worth paper again, this time for dairy goats, because neither Della nor Penny were in milk. I found a Toggenburg doe with triplet doelings for $75. This was a fantastic deal, but Dad thought it was too much money, so we didn't get her.

Meanwhile, they didn't want her in the house during the day, and increasingly, not at night, either. I couldn't put her in with Della and Penny. Penny might be OK, but Della butted everything in sight- cats, dogs, it didn't matter. I knew that Lamby would not be safe with her. So I took the two large tractor tires in the pasture which we played with and laid them one atop the other, like two stacked doughnuts, lined it with straw, and set Lamby in there. At night I covered it with a sheet of plywood in case it rained, and to keep her safe. She didn't seem to mind being in there. I checked on her frequently during the day, picked ticks off of her. She didn't resist, just laid passively on her side. I didn't know what a bad sign this was...I thought she was just tame. When she was out of the tires, Dad made me tie her out like the goats. She didn't have enough energy to run around anyway, but insisted that maybe what my newborn lamb needed was to eat some grass.

She deteriorated pretty quickly, and I became more and more upset with the way things were turning out. I spent hours trying to get her to eat, but she wouldn't even hold her head up anymore, and everything I did get into her came right out again as yellow scoury diarrhea. Mom became angry and one day, as I sat there with tears runnign down my face, begging Lamby to eat, she said harshly, "I wish Lamby would just die so that Rebekah would spend more time doing her chores! All she thinks about is Lamby." Not much time passed before Mom got her wish. Lamby began having seizures. By the next day, she was gone. I was heartbroken, and I couldn't believe that Mom had wished for my beloved little lamb, that had never hurt anything, to die.

2010-08-04T16:27:00.000-07:00

The spring was horribly muddy, mud as we'd never experienced before. I didn't care, though. I could finally run around in the pasture with sneakers instead of my heavy hiking boots, and with only a single pair of jeans. It felt so light to be freed of all that, and even the bare earth and pebbles looked beautiful to me. I pranced around happily, kicking the patches of snow that hadn't melted yet into bits. The nights were still cold, but at last, we could get out of the house.

Someone gave us some chickens, and we put them in some rabbit cages at first. It was funny, because when Sonny saw them, he ran right up to the cage and stood frozen, pointing at them, as perfect as any photograph of a working bird dog. We had found out that he was afraid of loud noises and gunshots in particular.

Most of my spare time was spent in the first garden I'd ever had. I dug the ground for it myself, used some split cedar rails we had laying around to make a fence around it. The entire garden was tiny, about the size of a small bathroom. I planted kohlrabi, peas, radishes, jersalem artichokes, beans, and others. We had no source of water, so I used the buckets of wash water that I had to empty everyday anyway. Raphah made a garden, too. He planted swiss chard and pumpkins. We insulted one another's gardens and bragged about our own, as we did with everything the other did, but secretly, I admired his garden. He was doing a really good job with the swiss chard. There was always a lot of rivalry between he and I, but behind it was a grudging respect, and the proof of this was that we were constantly trying to outdo one another.

Every seedling that came up was like a miracle. I spent a lot of time memorizing the appearance of the seedlings of each kind of plant. Some of them, like radishes and broccoli, looked a lot alike. I pulled out cards from magazines for free seed catalogs, and before long, I was spending hours reading them. What was even better was that companies I hadn't contacted seemed to find out somehow that I wanted gardening catalogs, and pretty soon I had a good sized stack of them! I began planning what kind of a farm I would have someday; what animals I'd have, what trees, and so on. Of course, everything on my farm would be done the old fashioned way, with horses instead of tractors. I wouldn't own a car or a truck or have electricity, but I would be better set up for living this way than our family was. I'd have a well with a hand pump. Or, I'd have the barrels set up on a platform outside the kitchen and bathroom, and have the hoses threaded through the walls and into the the sink so that I wouldn't have to bring the barrels indoors. I drew a lot of diagrams and lists and ideas. Everyone else laughed at me, but I just tuned them out.

I also spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of husband I wanted. After a lot of deliberation, I decided that he should be gentle, kind, patient, and have a good sense of humor. It would be nice if he were tall, because I didn't want my kids to be as short as I was. He should have blue eyes, and possibly blond hair. He should like animals, have similar interests, and would probably be Scandanavian. I prayed every day for Yahweh to send my husband to me soon, and to prepare me to be a good wife for him.

2010-08-03T16:26:00.000-07:00

On a rare trip to Coolin, there was some kind of an event going on, so we stopped to see what it was. It was some sort of historical thing. I never found out what else was there, because my attention was immediately consumed by the very first thing I saw: an older woman making wool yarn with a spinning wheel. We've all seen spinning wheels in antique stores, as decor, but rarely ever in use. The thing was a whir of motion, in seeming contrast to the woman's calm demeanor and slowly moving hands. She held a handful of fluffy wool and streched out small portions of it, which turned magically into yarn and fed into the orifice of the machine, to be wrapped automatically onto a spool of yarn. It was hypnotic; I just stared and tried to make sense of what was going on, how the thing worked. She looked up at me with a kind smile,

"Go on, ask me questions! I can see the gears turning in your mind."

I didn't usually talk to outsiders, but she was so gentle and warm that I did. At the end of the conversation, my newfound friend had invited me to her cabin up in Nordman, to teach me how to spin wool, how to knit, how to play with fibers and art. She asked me to bring some of my art with me when I came.

Miriam Kopek and I became friends. She was my mentor, a positive, calm, accepting and supportive person in the life of a teen who was used to being ridiculed, shamed and abused. The hours in her home were deeply happy. She seemed to think I was clever and very creative, and she actually loaned me her own spinning wheel once she'd taught me how to use it, and gave me bags of wool, yarn, and fabric. She never thought less of me for the conditions we lived in, even though she sometimes drove to pick me up or to take me home. I felt as though I'd found a fairy godmother. She clucked approvingly over everything I made and said that I had talent. She loaned me her books. Her husband worked in some sort of business where he had access to trial sample of cold cereal, and they gave us a lot of samples. We of course, were absolutely delighted to have any cold cereal at all, and the trial samples were fun. They tended to be similar but different, and you never knew exactly what it would be until you opened up the plain box.

Spinning wool is a very calming, centering activity. Although it wasn't classified as work (in other words, I could only spin wool in my limited free time), it wasn't frowned upon, either, because it was productive and a good skill for a young woman to have in preparation for marriage, which was the only sort of future that was ever entertained for me. Spinning wool and going to Miriam Kopek's became a welcome refuge from the strange, otherworldly drama that was our family life.

2010-08-01T16:25:00.000-07:00

We received word one day that Matt Christson's family had been forcibly taken from their land; it had been sold by the IRS because the Christsons didn't believe in paying taxes to Caesar. Don and Helen had been arrested, leaving Matt and Lee to fend for themselves at a local campground. They were both adults or nearly so, but the news left us shaken and sympathetic even though we didn't hang out with the Christsons much anymore. I wasn't sure why; it was something about the women not knowing their place in the family and them being respectful to Dad, who was a man. Everyone knew it was wrong for a woman to be disrespectful to a man. Still, we worried about the family.

We were busy struggling to survive ourselves, though. Once more out of work, Dad and Mom joined the Gleaners, a group that collected food from stores that would have been thrown away otherwise. Then Dad became active with the food bank, and was soon bring a lot more than our family needed home, and giving it to anyone we knew was hungry or could use more food. Some of it, like the cottage cheese, wouldn't keep very long. Mom tried draining it with cheesecloth and drying it in the bathroom to preserve it. This sort of grossed me out, what with the pot reeking day in and day out in the same air the cheese was hanging in. We had plenty of day old bread, and often the stale bread that was dry or beginning to mold went to the chickens, along with any food scraps.

It was my job to feed the chickens. They also got a coffee can full of corn every day. When I fed them the corn, I noticed that every once in a while, one of the corn kernels would be whole, not cracked. Occasionally, one of the whole kernels would be striped with red. Sometimes the kernel was almost all red. I found this interesting and exciting, because I liked unusual vegetables and especially unusually colored vegetables. Red corn would be pretty interesting, if I could breed for corn that had only red kernels! I began sifting through the corn before I fed it and saving out all the red kernels to plant next year. I had seen Hopi Blue flour corn in the Gurney's seed catalog, but never red corn. Maybe I would have something new on my hands!

I did the same thing with any vegetable or fruit that entered our house. I would hover around when they were being cut into and get the seeds, lay them out on paper towels or newspaper, and carefully label the paper. When the seeds were dry, I folded the paper up and saved it. I quickly found that citrus seeds pretty much had to be used fresh. They didn't grow well once they'd been dried. There was so much to learn about these things; I was frustrated at times by not being able to access more information.

My first radishes were ready, their red stems swelling just below the soil line into the characteristic radish shape that I'd waited for over a month to see. It was time to pick them, but the thought of pulling my beloved plants up out of the ground seemed wrong. Who was I to choose for a plant to die so I could eat it? It seemed so cruel! I almost cried as I pulled it out of the ground. At least with the pea plants, I wouldn't have to sacrifice the entire plant to eat it. The vegetable plants were beautiful, and I couldn't understand why none of the books or articles I'd read had ever mentioned this. Many of the seed catalogs didn't even show what the actual plant would look like, or how big it would be, only the vegetable itself, looking pretty much as it would in a grocery store. As far as I was concerned, my food plants were just as pretty as any silly, frivolous flower. I felt like they were really underrated in terms of aesthetics.

2010-07-10T16:24:00.000-07:00

A letter that I wrote to our friend Mark in the spring of 1989:

Dear Mark,
Howdy! How are you? We're all doing exceptionally well, considering our surroundings. The ground has thawed, thus becoming extremely muddy and the snow is also slowly, but surely, melting. It still snows very lightly during the night, but the snow now shines so brightly that it all melts almost immediately after the sun is a little bit above the mountains. The sun is shining so brightly that my pumpkin plants that I planted not long after you left have leaves twice as big as the leaves of the plants I planted previously. My pumpkin plants have never prospered this well before. I also am growing millet, turnips, broccoli, baby blue hubbard squash, zucchini squash, garlic, onions, a soybean, a kidney bean bush, eggplants, lentils, and a mimosa. I discovered that the 'hen and chicks' cactus is also know as 'Black Prince' (Echeveria). I think I like the name 'hen and chicks' much better. I have many more seeds to plant, but am not going to plant them immediately, as I am busy handling the ones I have, all of which are growing indoors.
The Canadian geese have come to the swamp near or on our property. I supect they are on it. We hear them honk a lot. Things are becoming increasingly interesting here. No longer do I say, "I'm bored". My friend/teacher Miriam Kopek lent me a spinning wheel a week ago, and taught me to spin and knit. I never thought I'd be a knitter. I enjoy it and spinning quite a bit though. She also gave me a box of carded wool and a garbage bag and a half of uncarded wool and many more things. She is going to give me free lessons, which we both enjoy very much.
Is your leg okay now? I hope so. We were going to get 2 or 3 lambs, but for various reasons, we didn't.
We very much enjoyed our Passover meal. I hadn't been that full for a long time. Well, I guess that's all the news for now. May Yahweh bless you and keep you. Love,
Rebekah

2010-07-09T16:24:00.000-07:00

Mark's girlfriend Ann, who we called Patricia, visited us often. Mark had chosen Elizabeth instead, but continued to see Patricia from time to time. Her heart was broken, and she called Mom (we now had a phone) and talked for hours, crying on her end. Mom prayed for advice from Yahweh, and told her that she would get her man, she had to be patient and have faith. In time, he would come around and see that she was his true love. Patricia came over for weekends sometimes and pitched right in with the chores. She never complained about our living conditions or acted as though she was better than us.

Elizabeth, on the other hand....well, when she came, it was pretty awful. We would spend a day or two cleaning beforehand, and no matter how hard we worked, there was only so much we could do for the place. Even then, she acted as though she might catch a disease simply from being in the house. It was obvious that she really did not want to be there. It was hard for us to like her, especially when we knew how devastated Patricia was over this snobby woman who had stolen Mark from her. What was worse, Elizabeth didn't act as though she loved Mark. She acted like he made her feel safe, like she was his companion, like she owned him, but not as though he were the center of her heart. Patricia did. She would have died for Mark in a heartbeat, and we all knew it.

I watched these things unfold before my eyes and watched in horror and dread. I hoped with all my heart that nothing like this would ever, ever happen to me, and I was terrified that it might. I didn't know if, faced with the kind of wrenching agony Patricia was going through, I'd be able to keep putting myself on the line like she did, keep hoping. When she was with Mark, you couldn't tell that anything was the matter. She simply looked delighted with every single second she spent with him. She was warm and affectionate, not standoffish and cold. We wondered why on earth he would make this choice, how he could do it to her, and how she could possibly take it.

You might wonder why we supported Patricia in her persistent affection for a man who had clearly chosen the other woman. The answer is simple: our family believed in polygamy. Yahweh had spelled it out for us some time ago:

•Sex= marriage. The first person you had sex with would be your husband or wife, whether you loved them or not, whether you ever saw them again or not.

•A woman could only have one husband, but a man could have lots of wives. Every single woman a man slept with was his wife.

•A woman could only get divorced in the case of adultery.

•In other words, if the two separated and she could hold out until he went and had sex first, then she could remarry guiltlessly. Otherwise, she was an adulteress.

•You have to be really careful who you have sex with, because you are stuck with them, forever. Even if you didn't want to have sex with them.

•Marriage licenses and ceremonies were all a mark of the Beast. All that mattered was if you were married in Yahweh's eyes.

•Families should be involved in selecting the proper mates for their children. Yahweh will tell them who the right one is. The young man or womman should await their true love and future mate rather than going out looking or dating.

•There is one, and only one, right man for every girl or woman. And if she doesn't find him and keep him, she will never, ever, be truly happy with anyone else. If he dies, she has lost her one and only true love.

2010-07-08T16:22:00.000-07:00

Halfway through May, we got a phone call from my Father and Marie. We had a new sister, Beth, in addition to our brother John, who was about 2; we had never met him although they sent us pictures from time to time. They had moved to Twin Falls in southern Idaho and wondered if we would like to come down for a visit. Sarah and I did want to visit. We were excited to meet our new brother and sister, and we wondered if our Dad (our real Dad!) would notice any change in us. Eliyah drove us to get us on a Sabbath. Mom insisted that we finish the Sabbath service before we went to meet him for the drive back down to Twin Falls, and it seemed to me as though the songs dragged on endlessly and that the longest possible scripture passages had been chosen.

As always, our Father was pretty quiet. I had surreptitiously brought my contacts with me- I didn't throw mine away when Mom said our eyes would be healed- and wore them now. The world was beautiful! The drive seemed to take a long time, but finally, after dark, we saw the twinkling lights of Twin Falls below us as we wound our way towards their home. We had a good visit. John was a really cute little boy and I helped dress him every morning. I had always enjoyed toddlers more than babies; Elizabeth was a beautiful sister, but she was so tiny, so frail, with all those veins under her pale, transluscent skin. I was terrified of her fragility, and she seemed to be in a lot of pain all the time, like she was colicky. Babies were certainly delicate, and I had no idea how to soothe or help with her, so I tended to John, who at least was able to talk and interact more.

We weren't supposed to attend my Father's church where he was organist, where he led bible studies. I don't remember if we did or not. If we did, we were breaking one of the conditions Mom had laid upon us prior to the visit: we were not to set foot in any "Temple of Baal". They took us swimming, where I lost one of my contact lenses, to play miniature golf, and to eat at a Mexican restaurant. Except for the last time my Father and Uncle Charlie had visited us, we hadn't been to a restaurant since the drive up to Idaho. All too soon, it was time to go home.

And what a welcome we got when we arrived there; Mom was livid with us for betraying her by going to visit our father. One day, while Dad was gone, she really came unglued. She started screaming that Sarah and I were just like our father, just as cold-hearted, and all sorts of other things. She said we didn't love her, and all sorts of other horrible things. Then she got the .45 gun that Mark had lent Dad and said she was going to kill herself. Sarah and I cowered in the small jack pines behind the house, terrified, confused, and unsure of what to do. Mom was waving the gun aroun din the air wildly like a madwoman and screaming guilt trips out to us as she marched off towards the swamp. Raphah and Rachel ran after her sobbing, begging her not to do it. Sarah and I weren't sure what to do. She didn't seem sane, and she had a loaded gun in her hand, and she didn't seem to care where it pointed. Her behavior was even more irrational than anything we'd ever seen before. Would she shoot us if we ran after her? We didn't know. Just then, we heard a single gunshot. We looked at one another, horrified. Silence seemed to stretch on forever. Raphah's voice:

"Mom, that's stupid! That's not the safety!"

Mom's: "Ow, ow, my ear! It went off right by my ear!"

Apparently, she'd been fiddling with the safety mechanism and somehow managed to pull the trigger without harming herself. Raphah and Rachel came back with her from the swamp. Later, she said that she'd never intended to actually kill herself. It had all been a test to see which of her chidlren really loved her, and Sarah and I had failed the test.

2010-07-07T16:22:00.000-07:00

Partway through the summer, two exciting events occurred. First, our Grandpa Kleber came to visit us, riding on his Honda Goldwing with a trailer, all the way from California! He'd brought bicycles for us, too! He didn't seem to mind our living conditions any more than Patricia did. He had lived in the country without fancy stuff in his childhood, had had goats and an outhouse. Grandpa Kleber was nice. He took us for rides on his motorcycle; I was scared to death on the gravel roads, afraid we would spin out, but he knew exactly how to handle the big bike.

Then we heard of someone who was giving away a horse! He was old, over 20 years old, an Appaloosa gelding, but he was free, broken to ride, and gentle. I couldn't believe that I was finally getting a horse of my own! Dad drove me out to where he was, a little less than ten miles away, and I rode Fox back. I rode bareback, as always, and was happier and more contented than I'd been in a very long time. I loved the slow pace of horseback riding, the partnership between myself and the horse, being able to feel the nuances of his movements without the bulk of a saddle. By the time we got home, I was terribly sore, but so proud of having ridden all the way home alone. It was the first time I'd been by myself since we'd lived in Kalispell Bay, when I'd vanish for hours on my walks.

Now, when Raphah and Sarah tied their goats out in the pasture, I went too, to tie Fox out with them. After what seemed like years, I was finally in possession of a horse again.

A photograph taken by Grandpa Kleber around this time shows me with hair falling past my shoulders, worn blue jeans, and my favorite red flannel work shirt, already worn thin. My face is tanned and ruddy, and despite the long hair, I look almost masculine, due to strong, well developed shoulder, neck, and arm muscles and the posture and attitude of an outdoor worker. I loved working outdoors, and the work that I did, especially splitting the wood, was the source of most of my pride, self respect, and identity. People didn't even stack for me anymore. If my sisters helped at all, I just wanted them to set up the round of wood on end and keep the cats away- cats had an unnerving habit of jumping onto the round of wood after the maul was enroute to where the cat was sitting. I threw the split wood to the stack against the house, and a lot of it settled into place on the stack. If it didn't, I'd adjust it later, but most of it did. It was the sort of thing you couldn't do if a house had nice siding, but that was part of the beauty of the cabin- you could just live and relax without having to cringe at the thought of breaking anything or messing up the wall. If we got mad, and Raphah and I got mad a lot, we could kick the walls of the cabin as hard as we liked and nothing would be damaged. I had been hanging around men and working with them for so long that my body movements, gestures, stance and behavior were a lot like theirs, which was possibly another reason why the self assured worker bee in the photo didn't look very feminine at all.

Most of our family called me Becky. Mom often called me Rebekah, especially if she was unhappy with me. Dad and Raphah called me Bucky. Bucky was OK with me, too. What I didn't like were other variations, mostly of Dad's invention: Bucko-Boy, Rebucko, Repucko, Rebukah, Repecka. But even these were better than the myriad insults he threw at me, which usually had to do with calling me a pig, one of the most reviled animals in our family because they were unclean, filthy animals abhorred even by Yahweh. Raphah was usually called "Bubba" or "Bubba boy".

The nicest thing Dad could say to Raphah or I, the highest compliment we could get, was that we were a good worker. When he told us this, our chests would swell with pride and we would glow. We knew it was true, but it was still nice to hear it, even if only rarely. And despite being such a good worker and still coming in at night to do my house chores and massage Dad's back and feet and pop his back into place, it wasn't good enough, because I wasn't ladylike. I wasn't enough like my sister Sarah.

2010-07-06T16:21:00.000-07:00

Romeo, the male long haired tabby cat we'd brought home from the dump, was never openly demonstrative like Colette was, but I had built a rapport with him. It wasn't that he was wild; he just wasn't an attention hog. He did have one very interesting habit, though: he enjoyed perching his large body on top of the screen door. You could open and close the door, and he'd remain up there, balancing on the narrow edge. Obviously, our screen door didn't close all the way. I thought it was a pretty interesting thing for him to do and found it amusing. He just sat there all day, a fat furry lump on top of the door.

It was my job to take care of all the the cats, and usually the dogs and chickens as well. If we ate any meat, such as poultry, I'd trim the carcass of every digestible portion, right down to cutting off the spongy ends of the long bones, and simmer these in a coffee can on the wood stove with some water. This gravy would then be poured over the cheap dog food, which was what both the cats and the dogs ate. Hamburger grease, leftover milk, anything like that was saved for the cats and dogs. The chickens got any vegetable scraps, fruit peels, and so on. Sometimes the cats would jump down into the chicken pen and gnaw on old carrot tops and other unlikely items; once I was absentminded and dumped the scraps for the cats into the chicken pens. One of the hens promptly picked up a chicken leg bone and began running around with it in her beak! Happy liked to eat apples when we picked them for free. I don't know if our animals were particularly hungry or if they were just opportunists.

Penny, Raphah's goat, didn't like being away from him. He didn't always tie her out, because he liked to ride around on her back. This sounds cruel, and maybe it was, but Penny was a really large goat, and Raphah was very small for his age. At 11 or 12 years old, he was still tiny. He worked very hard and could lift a surprising amount of weight; he was strong, but you would never guess it from looking at him, or his age, either. Anyway, when he went inside, she missed him, and would run up to the front door and stand up against it, with her googly goat eyes and her pendulous ears flapping as she looked for him through the glass. It was really funny that she stood there almost like a human. One day though, she jumped up too enthusiastically and broke the glass out of the front door. Then it wasn't funny anymore. We had to replace the glass with a piece of old plywood, and the house grew even darker inside without the light from the front door.

Dad didn't like Romeo sitting up on the edge of the screen door. He would sometimes slam the door to try to knock the cat off. Sometimes that worked, but Romeo's sense of balance was pretty amazing. Dad began to say that the cat was like a gargoyle, perched up there like that. He had a point. Romeo was as calm and impassive and unmoving as a gargoyle, and his elevated position added to the resemblance. It wasn't much of a stretch from there for Dad to conclude that the cat was evil, that it was a demon or that it had a demon. One day I came outside to find Dad and Raphah running around the house chasing something. Dad had a gun. He was trying to shoot Romeo. I went back inside and out the back door where I usually met the cats to feed them on the roof of the firewood lean to. Maybe I could save him if they didn't see me. It wasn't long before he came tearing around the corner and met me eye to eye, terrified and with a look of panic and betrayal on his face, holding up a wounded, bleeding paw. They had shot him and more or less missed, only wounding him. They came tearing around the corner too, and he fled and ran under the house. They got down on their bellies and tried to pursue him, but it was dark under there and they couldn't see anything. That night, Mom didn't sleep very well. All night long, she heard Romeo crying under the house, under her bedroom. She felt bad about it, thought Dad was making a mistake. Of course, he wouldn't listen. He had meant to kill an animal, and it got away wounded, a typical slippery maneuver for any demon. Later he and Raphah caught it and took him back to the dump, and Raphah shot the cat himself, in the head. He had been so excited an eager to kill it, but when he came back, he looked sickened. He said that when he shot it, its eyes popped out of its head. All I could think of was the expression on the cat's face when he ran into me, a look that said, "How could you? How could you betray me?". It wasn't my fault at all, but I felt guilty and troubled by it. Maybe if I hadn't worked on making him friendly, he wouldn't have sat up on the door like that and he'd still be OK.

2010-07-04T16:20:00.000-07:00

Most of our days were used up with work of one kind or another. We treasured time to read or make things. As far as playing, we really didn't much anymore. It wasn't only that there was no free time, there wasn't much in the way of entertainment that we could do that wasn't offensive to Yahweh. Besides, playing was conspicuous. If Dad caught us reading books (as opposed to the scriptures) or doing anything he considered a waste of time, he would find something for us to do. Aside from tending to his royal highness's personal maintenance, there were usually things to do outside.

One that Raphah got stuck with a lot was using a hard rake to rake decorative patterns into the driveway dirt. Or we might be ordered to rake under the edge of the forest and pile up all the twigs, branches, pine needles, and duff into a brush pile. Or to dig postholes for fencelines, holes which would never actually hold a post. His favorite task was to assign us to move piles of lumber. Often this involved sorting the lumber as well. If there was a stack of cedar 2X8's, a stack of studs in various lengths, and a stack of thin cedar tongue and groove, it wasn't enough to simply restack all the piles as they were, although sometimes that was all we had to do. Usually though, we had to sort it all. We might be asked to pull any of the cedar 2X8's that had any kind of rot, or to stack the cedar tongue and groove so that each length was separated from the others, and the studs would have to be stacked by size as well, pulling out any that were warped, or stacking the warped ones at the bottom, etc. Often the piles were moved to one place and then back again within a month or two. There was no point to the work except to make us subservient and to use up our energy and time. I didn't have to measure it anymore to determine the length. By now Raphah and I could both eyeball the lumber and tell pretty accurately what the lengths were.

If we wanted to read or do anything fun, we had to wait until Dad was asleep or off driving to go talk to people. We could get away with reading the bible or writing poetry for Yahweh or praying for dream interpretations and stuff like that. I could go pick wild herbs for tea, such as the wild swamp mint or wild strawberry leaves, or rosehips, and I could clean the chicken pen for my garden, but climbing a tree or running around for the sake of running around would quickly result in being assigned to some sort of chore.

One day he was gone. I'd been thinking for some time of making a work sled to haul wood and hay on in the winter, and possibly one another. I thought maybe we could train Fox to pull it. I had surreptitiously drawn out plans for it, and now I snuck out to the pile of douglas fir 2X6's and selected two straight ones, 8 feet long. I drew the curve I wanted for the tip and was using a bow saw to make this cut when Raphah caught me.

"What are you doing? You can't use that!"

I ignored him and kept sawing.

"What are you making? Dad's gonna be so mad when he finds out you used those!"

Still I said nothing. Eventually his curiosity overcame him and he promised not to tattle if I would let him help. I didn't want to let him help. I knew what would happen- he'd tell me I was making it wrong because I was a 'stupid girl'. Let him make his own sled! We ended up making it together, though, with a minimum of squabbling. We set the two 2X6 runners on edge and tied them together with 1X4's and attached a 2X4 to the top side of the runners, to pull it by. We used some of the cedar tongue and groove for the platform of the sled, because that would be lightweight. We both knew that the lighter the sled was, the easier it would be to pull. We got away with all this by selecting wood that was flawed in some way, and cutting off the flawed portions. Besides, it was a sled for work. Dad didn't get mad.

2010-07-02T16:19:00.000-07:00

Towards the fall, after my seventeenth birthday, Dad finally got a real job with a regular source of income: delivering the Spokesman Review newspaper. The route was actually a combination of two routes. It covered all of Priest River and all of the drops between Priest River and Sandpoint, and that side of Sandpoint. Because we lived in Coolin, we had to get up even earlier than the already insane hours required for the job. And "we" is the operative word here. Eliyah usually did not run the route himself, and never on Sundays, which were the worst. Either Raphah, Sarah or I went with him, folding and banding the papers as he drove. Sundays sometimes involved the whole family, because the Sunday paper came in two parts that had to be assembled, and it was fat, so you couldn't fold it; it had to be rolled, and the bands broke a lot, and it wouldn't fit nicely into the plastic bags provided for us to wrap the papers in. Sundays were a pain.

We took this route over from a man named Denny Driver. He was moving due to marital issues, getting a divorce because he'd taken up with a 16 year old girl. He was into horses. Now, for some reason I don't understand, we ended up cleaning out Denny Driver's house for him and packing up his stuff and storing it. The impression that I got was that he was giving or selling his stuff to us, but I have no idea what was actually going on. I only know that the entire family cleaned up what he apparently didn't want, and we stored it in a building a block away from the large office space we used for the paper route work.

Now, here is another thing that I don't understand: my mom and Eliyah somehow got a brand new truck when the old crew cab quit working. It was a bright shiny red GMC truck, the small, cute kind. It may have had something to do with Dad being friends and business partners with Steve McNearney. Maybe Steve cosigned on it; I really don't know. I can only say that we got a new truck, and yet our standard of living was still pretty bad, and we had no real source of income other than the paper route. Moreover, we soon got another new vehicle, a blue Chevy Blazer that would seat most of us. Now that Dad was in Sandpoint every single day, he began working for the food bank, picking up donations from Yoke's and Safeway and delivering them to the food bank. Of course, because of this, we got a lot more food from the food bank than we used to.

The paper route was grueling. We had to get up at about 3 in the morning, gobble down some breakfast, and ride to Priest River and pick up the bundles of newspapers at the drop spot at the post office. Then the rider (such as Raphah or I) would hurry and roll and band a lot of papers as quickly as possible while Dad started driving to the boxes. You had to have a paper in hand, positioned for him to grab easily when he stopped, or to shove into the box yourself if it was on your side of the street. I learned to fold two papers at a time, one in each hand. If you got behind, Dad would get angry and start yelling, "Paper! Paper!!!" with increasing volume. You did not want to get behind. Also, he would start threatening to not take you anymore if you couldn't keep up. And believe it or not, this was a valid threat, because despite the yelling, and the sleep deprivation, and not usually eating anything until we got home at 10 AM or later, and the carsickness, we loved going on the paper route. We were all desperate to get out of the house, to see the outside world. Until the paper route, we had hardly been to Sandpoint. And although we usually sat in the car the entire time unless we were allowed to get out to go to the bathroom, being able to see everything was terribly exciting, even if we were imprisoned behind the glass window of the truck.

One day when I went along on the paper route, I did get out of the truck. Or rather, Dad actually told me to get out of the truck. He gave me $10 and told me to buy myself breakfast or whatever I wanted and left me near the Cedar Street bridge. Then he drove off to talk to a business contact, saying he would pick me up again after a while. I was stunned. Ten dollars seemed like a fortune to me. And I had been set free in the middle of Sandpoint! I was at a loss. For a fleeting moment, I thought of calling the Christson family to come and get me, but I knew that this would be futile. They would never help me get away from my family. It was early, about 9 AM, and most of the businesses were closed. There was a small greasy spoon type cafe, and there were people in it, but I felt funny about going in there, all alone, surrounded by strangers. I was afraid to, even though I was hungry. Besides, ten dollars! Think of all the things I could buy with ten dollars! I didn't want to waste it on a breakfast.

I wandered up one side of the street and down the other, feeling excessively self conscious. I sat on a park bench near the Cedar Street Bridge and gazed for some time at the flowers in the planters, mentally cataloging them. I had spent so much time poring over seed catalogs, even the flower sections, that I knew what most of the plants were. Then some people came along and sat on a nother bench not far away, so I got nervous and left and entered the Cedar Street Bridge.

Inside, the first thing I came to was a woman artist making pastel portraits, many of them children. I saw from the publications she had near her display that she was also a Seventh Day Adventist. Even though Adventists didn't use the Sacred Names, I felt a kinship with them because they also kept Sabbath and didn't eat pork or other unclean foods. I stood there for a very long time, possibly an hour, looking at the work she had hanging and watching her draw. She was using pastel pencils, not the chalky things that I had tried at home, that got all over my fingers. After she was done, she sprayed fixative over the work. She was very good. I walked over to an ice cream shop in the building. They had mocha ice cream, so I ordered a waffle cone. I still had seven dollars left and was wondering what else I could buy when Dad reappeared, pocketed the rest of the money, and took me back home.

2010-07-01T16:18:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned before that we were frequently told to seek prophecies or "words" from Yahweh, and especially on Sabbath. I was continually uneasy about this sort of thing, because I was never sure if it was my inner mind, my imagination, or if it was truly Yahweh. If I wasn't sure, I really didn't want to do it at all. Nevertheless, I tried, because everyone else got words, and I was afraid that my difficulty in this area might indicate a serious spiritual flaw. Also, it seemed to me that Yahweh must have better things to worry about than our petty little questions. After all, He had an entire universe to run! It sort of reminded me of a toy I'd seen as a child, a black plastic ball that would answer your questions. It was constructed in such a way that it was right more than 50% of the time, because some of the answers were vague. Also, a lot of the answers were contradictory if you took everyone's words and compared them, and a lot of things were later declared to be writings of Satan. So to be honest, I tried to avoid this sort of thing when I could. Something was wrong, and I wasn't sure what it was.

Nevertheless, for whatever reason, I was praying one Sabbath in the middle of October when a prophecy came to me, and it scared me. It said that within three days, an earthquake would strike California. I never received prophecies like this, predicting calamities, and especially not with a time frame like that. I was terrified. What if it didn't happen? Then I would be a false prophet deserving of being stoned to death. What if it was right? Would that be my fault? And of course, Mom and Dad jumped right on it. They were excited! Judgement on California, with all its materialism and sin and homosexuality! We had known this was coming! I did not share their enthusiasm. It seemed to me that either way, the outcome would be bad.

By Tuesday, three days later, it had happened. A large earthquake had hit San Francisco. Mom and Dad thought this was even more of a sign, and went around telling everyone they knew that we had known this was going to happen. The whole thing scared me and left me feeling very uneasy.

2010-06-13T16:17:00.000-07:00

Thanksgiving came; we invited Mark and Elizabeth over. Unfortunately, we'd vastly underestimated how long it takes to roast a turkey in an outdoor barbecue grill in the winter. It was delicious, it was hickory smoked, and it wasn't done until after 10 PM, when our company had already disengaged themselves from the situation as gracefully as they could.

Dad had started cutting trees from the property we were on. Obviously, you aren't supposed to do this on a rented place, so he tried to cut them in the woods rather than from the front yard. The wooden sled we'd made was getting plenty of use already.

I was having a blast collecting squash and pumpkins seed, my latest obsession. We got a really big pumpkin from someone (maybe the food bank?) and Raphah and I saved seeds from it, hoping to grow giant pumpkins next spring. The seeds were the biggest of any we'd collected so far, about an inch long with thick, heavy shells. We laid them out carefully on newspapers and paper towels; the entire table and part of the counter was covered. We left them there overnight, the oil lamp on the table turned down low. The next morning, we awoke to collect our seeds, and they were gone. The newspaper and paper towels were still there, and the seeds on the counter were there, but every single seed on the table was absent. There were a few tell-tale dark, oblong droppings, larger than usual. We couldn't believe it! Some rodent had come and taken all of our seeds!

We told this to acquaintances, and someone suggested it sounded like the work of pack rats. Mice were always a problem in our house, even with our huge cat population, so Dad bought some bait bar and we placed it all over in places we thought a rat or mouse might hang out. Mom found a chunk of it in her shoe one morning and remarked that the rats must be smart enough to know that the bait bar was poisonous, because they were trying to give it back! The roof leaked in a small area we called the pantry (although we never used it for anything to do with food) so we kept a glass gallon jar in there to catch the water. Imagine our surprise and disgust when, some time later, we found the jat packed full of dead rats! Bait bar makes them thirsty, and so they all sought out the only source of standing water in the whole house- that jar- and drowned.

Dad decided we had too many cats, so he took a bunch of them and dumped them alongside the highway. Colette was one of them, so once again, I had no cat. A month or two later, I was sitting at the table one evening trying to make a really good pencil drawing of a horse, when I heard a sound behind me. It was an insistent, nagging mewing. I turned to see a gray kitten with long, dense hair and green eyes rubbing against me, wanting attention.

"Where did this cat come from?", I asked.

Dennis just smiled. He said it was a Bradbury cat. Apparently the owners of the Bradbury mill had given it to him. I called the cat Andre. Later I learned that Andre was a female, so I had to change her name to Andrea. Andrea was, without exception, the most demanding cat I have ever had, but she was also excessively affectionate and very cute. To be honest, she was not a cat I would have selected for myself, but I loved her regardless. Besides, now I had a cat again.

Snow came and stayed, and I was splitting and stacking wood a lot of the time, unless we were on the paper route or trying to catch up on lost sleep after going on the route. We never really felt like we got all the sleep we needed back again. Dad slept until the early afternoon almost every day, woke up before dinner, and went back to bed after dinner, usually finding sleep with the help of our hands massaging him back to sleep. I had learned that if I started with his feet, which hurt him the most because he was so overweight, sometimes he would fall asleep before I had to do the rest of him. I'd heard that the feet have pressure points that affect the entire body, so starting with the feet seemed like a very effective time saver. Still, he also was sleep deprived and crabby a lot of the time.

One night Happy and Sonny were barking. Was it a moose in the yard? A bear? We'll never know. All I do know is that in the morning, there was a huge stain of blood in front of the house and both of the dogs were gone. Dad had shot Happy for barking at night, and when Sonny (who was already afraid of gunshots) saw his friend die, he must have figured he was next, because he ran for his life and never came back. It wasn't much of a consolation to get Princess back from Doug and Donna, because she wasn't attached to us and had to live on a chain. Happy had been our friend. He'd played with us and lifted our spirits. We stared numbly at that big red blot in the snow. Ours was not a very safe family for animals.

2010-06-12T16:16:00.000-07:00

Sometimes we all stayed home while both our parents went to do the paper route and food bank runs. On one such day, Mom came back smiling that afternoon and said she thought she'd found a husband for me. I asked her all sorts of questions, but she didn't answer most of them. I did find out that the man was rustic and that Mom thought he was perfect for me. She said I'd have to ask Yahweh if this was the right one before meeting him. So I did pray, and the answer was affirmative. Of course, what can you expect from a suggestible teenaged girl who has been trained and groomed to be a young bride? I had picked out names for my children already a year or two before.

And so I waited and waited to meet this man. From time to time Mom would tell me a little bit more, but mostly she just smiled mysteriously. She did say that he was very much into doing everything the old-fashioned way, which sounded a lot like me. The days crept by at a frustraingly slow pace. When I went with on the paper route, I kept my eyes peeled for this man, but Dad just rolled his eyes if I tried to ask questions and made derogatory and crude sexual remarks...when he wasn't going on about trading me for many ponies, blankets, and rifles.

I was so tired of feeling like a freak, like an outcast, like the laughingstock of the family. More than anything in the whole world, I wanted a companion I could relate to, someone who would understand me, soemone I could talk to without being ridiculed. I felt as though wherever I went, no matter what I did, I wasn't good enough. They always wanted me to be more feminine, to be more like Sarah, to be more normal. I wasn't sure why I wasn't good enough, what was wrong with me, but there was a screaming ache within me for acceptance, and so far, the only place I'd found any was in my four legged friends.

Princess, the dog we'd gotten back from Doug and Donna, was a problem. She killed chickens, which was why they gave her back to us. Still, she was a good watch dog; it was just that she had to be on a chain all the time. Mom said that it was wrong to call a dog "Princess", and Yahweh didn't approve of that name. She renamed the dog "Precious", which was close enough in sound to not be confusing to the dog. Mom and Dad came home one day with a new dog, Corky. Corky was a purebred Australian Shepherd. He was tricolored, which was more of less the same coloration that Precious had. He was a stud, and he was given to us because he was madly in love with the neighbor dog at his old home, a small dachsund. Obviously, this union was dangerous for his girlfriend, and despite the best efforts of his owner, the two lovers simply could not be kept apart. Even when we got him, he tried to run away several times, heading back to his old home, and his former owner told us to duct tape his mouth shut, because he cried mournfully for the dachsund all night long. When we took the tape off in the mornings, it pulled some of the fur off of his muzzle. Before long, Precious came into heat, and Corky had a diversion. He was such a gentle, loving dog. His eyes just sang with kindness and devotion- except when a female dog was in heat. When there was a bitch in heat, Corky became irritable and snappy if anyone approached them. Perhaps he was thinking he would be interfered with or removed from his mate again...but in any case, we learned that when he was breeding, it was best to leave him alone. Once she went out of heat, he would be his lovable old self again.

About the same time, our family met a man whose daughter had a goat for sale. She was a French Alpine, a milker, and I bought her sight unseen for the $35 that Dad now owed me. After all, we already owned two goats who didn't produce anything, and this one would earn her keep. I went to see her after agreeing to buy her. Snow was white with spots of brown and black. She was leaner and more angular than Della or Penny. I tried to milk her, but could not get the hang of it; every time I squeezed her teat, the milk went back up into her udder instead of squirting into the bucket. I must have hurt her in the effort, because she turned her head back and yanked on a mouthful of my hair! I can't say that I loved her, but I was proud to have made a good purchase of a productive animal. Diane, the girl who was selling her to me, said that since I couldn't milk yet, it would be better if she dried Snow off for the winter, and that she would keep her until then if I wanted to. Mom was fretting about 'proper' quarters for the goats we had, having read the disastrous goat section in Grow it!. She thought it was abusive not to have the goats on concrete floors, not realizing that concrete is terribly hard on their joints....so we agreed to pick Snow up in the spring, when we were more prepared.

When Dad took the paper route over from Denny Driver, he was also given a couple of tools to deter agressive dogs. One was a plastic handheld device that made a very high pitched sound when you pulled the trigger. It was supposed to make animals disorientated, to cause them to forget whatever they'd been thinking about and leave you alone. I hated that thing, because I could hear it. Dad claimed I couldn't possibly hear it, but I could and it was awful. Fox hated it, too. When he came to the front of the house and tried to hang around, Dad would point it at him and chuckle as the old horse ran away hurriedly. The other device was a sort of stun gun. I don't know if it was for dogs or human attackers, but Dad used it on us as well as the dogs, cats, horses, whatever he could zap. It hurt, but the pain didn't last for any longer than the trigger was held. Mostly it was the surprise suddenly feeling an electrical shock for no good reason. If you have ever inadvertently touched an electric fence, that's sort of what it felt like. He liked to hide it in his clothing and nail us as we walked by. Or he would call us to do a favor for him, and as soon as we were near, he would shock us. It wasn't ever used as a punishment for wrongdoing, he just got a kick out of seeing us jump and scream, so it was totally unpredictable. This was even worse, because you couldn't go near the man without fear, yet he would order you to come to him. The anxiety in the house soared to a new level. Now, in addition to his rubber band gun and toothpicks, he had this stun gun.

Mom continued to drop hints about the man she thought might be my future husband. I found out his name- Daniel, but they couldn't remember his last name, that he had blond hair, blue eyes, was somewhat older than me, looked like Robert Redford, was a farmer, and had sheep and a draft horse. Mom seemed as though she herself might be attracted to him. She said he was kind of a ladies man. I wasn't sure what a ladies man was, so I didn't know what to think of this comment. They told me that Yahweh wanted me to make a drawing of a mother bear fishing for her cubs, and that I was to give it to this man if he were the right one.

Living in the cabin was slightly easier now. They had somehow procured a refrigerator that would work in the cabin (it must have been propane) and a generator which allowed us to use a light in the kitchen. Also, Sarah and I were allowed to wear our old glasses again. It was understood that we still were having faith in our eyes getting healed, we just needed the glasses to make life easier until then. It was amazing how beautiful even the smallest things were with our glasses! It was a lot easier for me to ride Fox, too; until then, I didn't see things like tree limbs right in front of me until there was just enough time to duck. Amazingly, I galloped all over the farm and only got hurt once. I had been riding on a Sabbath, fell off, hit my head on a rock and got knocked out. This was acknowledged as hard proof that Yahweh disapproved of recreation on Sabbaths. When we got our glasses back, we were amazed at how incredibly dirty the house was, especially with the new electric light (one light bulb) in the kitchen! The corners, which had been so dimly lit by the kerosene lamps alone, were particularly filthy. We continued to use the oil lamps, because we only had one light, and only when the generator was running. Even with our glasses, our sight was far from perfect. During the time without them, our sight had actually deteriorated, probably from constantly straining to see. They were still so much better than nothing at all that we were elated. Meanwhile, Mom continued to drive without glasses or contacts of any kind. Her sight was at least as bad as my own, so driving wasp retty hazardous. She got around this by having Raphah or Rachel ride in the front seat and tell her what they saw. They alerted her to dangers such as deer, oncoming traffic, or that she was coming up on a curve or veering out of her lane.

2010-06-11T16:14:00.000-07:00

The morning of the last day of 1989, Mom and Dad hauled us all in to help with the Sunday paper. After we had assembled and bagged the papers, Mom and Dad went off to deliver them. When they came back, we had work ahead of us, because Denny Driver's young girlfriend had broken into the building where we'd stored his stuff and had stolen some of it. We were left bored in the office building. We read through the comics, I read the food section, the Ann Landers column, and everything else that looked interesting. The newspaper was our main link to the outside world; however a lot of what I read referred to things that were common knowledge for most people but which I had not heard of before. For example, celebrities, movies, books, things that would be covered in high school or college, history...there were huge gaps in my knowledge base and as a consequence, what I read in the paper did not always make as much sense as it should have. As usual, I had brought a seed catalog with me to read. This was the new Gurney's catalog, and I went through it circling things that interested me. Reliance peaches that could make it in our climate! Hopi blue flour corn! Apples: Cortland, Winesap, Sweet Sixteen.... Even this fascinating activity grew old after awhile. I laid the catalog on dad's desk and we played twenty questions for a while, and then drew silly pictures on the whiteboard.

We heard the door shut downstairs and sat down in our chairs as though we'd been sitting down all along. We listened to them approach; one of the voices wasn't familiar, it sounded like it might be a man. Suddenly the door opened and Mom and Dad walked in with a strange man. Mom introduced us all to one another. This was Daniel. I scrutinized him carefully when he wasn't looking my way. He did not look anything like what I'd expected, and I sort of wondered what Mom had been thinking. For one thing, he was a lot older than me, 18 years older, which put him at 35. And his hair was really short; I was used to hanging out with bearded and hippie type people. I considered the fact that he was also divorced. Maybe it would be better if we were just friends. He didn't say much. He just walked over to the wall and sat down against it on the floor! We offered him one of the many chairs but he politely declined. I began to think he was kind of unusual. He was dressed in hickory striped coveralls and moved as though he had been in the military (the Navy, it turned out). He did not look at us or say anything.

Then Dad began calling business contacts and newspaper customers and we all grew even more bored. Dad could gab for hours and be perfectly contented, telling stories and jokes and parables to perfect strangers, like telemarketers, for example, that he would never meet again. Daniel jumped up to his feet and started wandering around the room. Seeing the seed catalog on the desk, he picked it up and began flipping through it. Then he spoke up and wanted to know whose catalog this was, who had been circling the blue corn? It turned out that blue corn was one of his obsessions, and soon he was sitting beside me and we were talking a hundred miles an hour about everything from the blue corn to peaches to sheep , goats, and draft horses. Once he opened up his mouth, he was a really interesting, engaging guy! And he had sparkling blue eyes that made smile wrinkles all over his face when he smiled. He spoke to me as if the things I had to say were actually worthy of attention rather than ridicule. My knees began trembling. I tried to hold them still, but even when they were knocking together violently, he pretended he didn't notice, as though all was well. He had a very reassuring presence. I think I was probably nervous because I had never spoken to any man except for Matt Christson, and then only very, very briefly and casually. I was unused to being around men, had never been on a date, and this was all happening very quickly.

Dad hung up the phone at last, and we spent the rest of the day moving the furniture and boxes of stuff. Daniel was a good worker, very businesslike and efficient. That evening Dad took him back to his home on Wrenco Loop and our entire family slept in the office, because our work wasn't done. In the morning, Dad did the route alone (Monday papers are small) and did Wrenco Loop last, picking up Daniel on the way. We had nothing to eat that morning except for cheap sugary doughnuts and coffee, but I didn't care, because I liked Daniel already. All my life, I'd felt like a left foot in a family of right feet; always out of place, never good enough the way I was. It was such an incredible relief to meet another person I could relate to. It was as though I'd been waiting for him all my life, had always known him and always would.

Mom and Dad had some sort of business stuff that they didn't want Daniel to be included in and Dad had work for him to do at our house, so they had him drive Raphah and I home in the red truck. We could tell him how to get there. Daniel was fun to talk to and had all sorts of interesting things to say. The three of us chattered happily all the way home. Once we got home, we started a fire so that the house could get warm, and then showed him around our place. He gave Fox a big hug, looked at the goats, the pets, Precious and her puppies. It was clear that he loved animals, although he was non-commital about taking a puppy when they were old enough.

Mom, Dad, and the girls came home about half an hour after we did, and then we had to work. We brought our wooden sled into use as usual while we did the firewood. Daniel was curious about the sled, wanted to know we'd made it. He'd been thinking about getting a sled for his draft horse, Casper, to pull. Daniel was a good worker, very efficient and businesslike with a good work ethic, but this didn't keep him from smiling, joking around, and even singing as he worked. This was such a pleasant change from my sullen brother and domineering, bullying stepfather; working with Daniel was actually fun! At the day's end, we came inside for dinner. While we were out working, Mom, Sarah, and Rachel had been busy making lentil soup and biscuits.

After dinner, Daniel wanted to see me spin wool. He had sheep and was wondering if he could make his own spinning wheel, but first he needed to know how one worked. We had already talked about my idea of adapting an old bicycle, and unlike my family, he didn't laugh at me for it or call me an idiot. He thought it was a good idea. So I brought the spinning wheel into the kitchen/common area and started spinning some yarn. Some of the people were still at the table to my left. Daniel sat to my right, focusing intently on the wheel's action and moving parts. Suddenly I felt a very sharp pain in my bottom! I might have yelped a little, because it startled Daniel. I looked around in the direction of the pain's origin. Only Dad was there, looking quite innocent and relaxed with a toothpick in his mouth. His eyes twinkled with mischeif, daring me to make a scene. I knew that was what he wanted, so I stubbornly turned back to the wheel as if nothing had happened, determined not to give him any satisfaction at all. I went back to the spinning, and soon he poked me again; this time I acted as though I hadn't felt a thing. Dad chuckled, but I just ignored him. Daniel looked a little worried when I glanced at him, but I kept spinning and talking with him even as Eliyah continued to poke me from time to time. Well, the last poke really hurt. I didn't jump, but was certain that it had broken the skin, even through the double layer of blue jeans. It hurt too much to ignore and he was just going to keep poking me as long as he could get away with it, so I stopped spinning and wound the end of the yarn around the peg on the wheel so it wouldn't unravel. Daniel was looking very concerned by now, as though he wondered what would come next. Dad chuckled maliciously as I approached him; not even bothering to look innocent this time, the toothpick was still in his hand. Fast as a snake, I grabbed that hand, put all my weight and strength into wrestling for that damned toothpick. When I got it, I broke it into tiny, short little pieces and threw them at the woodstove. I hadn't said a word and neither had Dad or Daniel, but Dad chuckled again and got up and plodded off to bed, apparently having achieved his goal of humiliating me. Daniel looked relieved.

My victory was cut short by Rachel's proud announcement that I was an artist! I blushed all the way down to my toes, very embarrassed, but she had already gone to fetch all my sketch pads to show him. Usually when people look at a sketchbook, the page through it quickly, but not Daniel. He looked at each drawing for a long time, making insightful comments. At one point he said sadly that he wished I had taken more time on the hooves. I had only scrawled them in very roughly.He would notice something like that, working with horses day in and day out. Later on I went back though them and redrew all the hooves with more care. He liked my work though, he seemed to really understand it. By the time he was through, I was so certain that he was in fact the man Yahweh had chosen for me that I went and got the drawing of the mother bear fishing and gave it to me. He accepted it with a quiet gratitude as though he knew the significance of this piece of paper. Dennis took him home that night, but I was happy. I knew that I had finally found the right one.

2010-06-10T16:12:00.000-07:00

Dad continued to bring Daniel over to work from time to time. Things went so much more quickly with him there and we didn't get yelled at when he was around, even though we worked a lot. He didn't act like he was 35; it was like having another kid around, except that his opinion and presence had weight with our parents because he was an adult, so we felt protected. He and I often pulled the wooden sled together and joked about being a well matched team of draft horses. The sled would be loaded high with rounds to be split as we hauled it from the woods. One the rope that we pulled with broke suddenly and we fell into the snow, laughing.

Another time, we were carrying longer, smaller diameter logs out on a path that was too narrow for the sled. It was getting dark and the path was hard to see. After a while, we couldn't see it at all, and were in the forest when we realized we'd gone off the path. Daniel and Raphah were worrying about where the path was. I felt for it with my feet and quickly found it. He was surprised, and I told him that I was used to relying on senses other than sight, because I had gone so long without glasses. When we got back to the house, Sarah and I talked to him (out of earshot of our parents) about how even with our glasses, we really could not see that well. We detailed what we could and couldn't see. I tried putting on both my and Sarah's glasses together, and was amazed at the clarity and detail. I turned towards Daniel, hoping to finally see his face clearly for once. He was frowning and looked upset, so I quickly took the double set of glasses off. I figured he was frowning because I looked stupid that way.

As for Daniel working for us, I think Dad had agreed to pay or barter with him, but am not sure if he ever actually got paid. Maybe Dad was trying to barter me off like Laban did with his daughters Rachel and Leah in the bible. We always fed him well, and he was definitely hungry, even though he ate the meat reluctantly. I turned out that he was a Seventh Day Adventist and vegetarian, and only ate meat at our house so as not to offend us by refusing. He also didn't like cooked tomatoes, only raw, no sugar...I wondered how on earth I would feed this man, because most of what Mom had taught me to cook so far relied rather heavily on cooked tomatoes! Clearly, I would have to learn some new recipes.Dad brought home a lot of smelt one day and put us all to the task of gutting them before being fried. I didn't know about this, not having much of an appetite for fish in the first place, but Daniel, who was of Norwegian extraction, seemed enthusiastic about it, so I guessed I would at least try them. Once they were all cooked, whole except for the guts, he and Dennis crunched right into them, bones, head, and all! I just could not eat the heads, remembering the dead eyes of the fish staring up at me as I gutted them.

The thing about Daniel is that he was really, really poor. He told of us how destitute he'd been when he first came to Idaho from Minnesota, how he'd cooked and eaten the horse's sweet feed as cereal to survive. How, more recently, he'd been so hungry for fresh green vegetables that he'd attempted to cook and eat some alfalfa hay, but it didn't agree with his digestive system. He showed us his lunch one day, about 25 small apples that like us, he had picked for free. This was what he generally ate for a lunch when he worked as a farm hand for his old farmer friends. I didn't mind that he was poor; I knew that there were far more important things in life, small beauties that couldn't be purchased for any amount of money. Besides, I'd seen my father's family. Despite all the money they had, they didn't seem particularly happy, and they didn't seem to enjoy life half as much as Daniel did. His brown Carharrts were ripped and patched, his favorite sky blue shirt was torn at the armpit, and he had only one hand-sewn sheepskin mitten because he was still working on the other one, but none of these things mattered to me. He lived in a house that was even smaller than our own and also without electricity or running water. He had an artesian well that he carried water from by buckets. All of this sounded heavenly to me. I had long since concluded that a person could be rich and dissatisfied, or poor and happy, and decided that the latter group was for me. I didn't want any of the rich old men Dad was always talking about. A poor farmer was just fine by me.

2010-06-09T16:12:00.000-07:00

As the courtship with Daniel continued, Dad was making lewd, sexual comments on a regular basis, and his groping hadn't slowed down, either. I felt even more soiled than I had before and disloyal on top of it, even though I had never initiated or encouraged these advances in any way. Of course, there was always a chaperone nearby whenever Daniel was there, even if we were only talking, usually a brother or sister. Every word was listened to, nothing was confidential.

Around this time, the most terrifying experience I'd ever had occurred. I was asleep and had a dream. Things started going strange in the dream, spinning wildly out of control, disorienting, and my heart was pounding at an increasing rate proportional to the spinning things in the dream. I couldn't breathe, my chest hurt, and my heart was pounding so hard that I could hear it loudly, drowning out the sound of anything else, deafening. Things were going black, and I knew that I was about to die, that it was going to happen, it was coming. Absolute terror engulfed me. I screamed, but no sound came out, was screaming with all my might, and all I could hear was a whispery, faint sound. I couldn't move, couldn't breathe, couldn't talk, was helpless in the face whatever was happening. By now I was awake, but I still couldn't talk or scream. I was left frozen with fear in a way that I'd never known before. There are simply no words adequate to express how horrible it felt. I laid there in my dark bed, terrified to go back to sleep lest it happen again.

I tried to explain it in the morning. I thought maybe something was wrong with my heart, or that I'd had a seizure. I was afraid of dying if it happened again. Eliyah leered knowingly and said I'd had a "swoon" because I was so turned on by Daniel. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. A swoon? Swoons were stupid things that happened to dumb airheady women in Victorian novels, not to sturdy outdoorsy girls like me. Besides, I didn't have a nice dream about Daniel, I had a nightmare that had nothing at all to do with him. But Dad kept talking about the "swoon" and hinting that it was some kind of a sexual experience, and I knew for a fact that what had happened to me was the farthest thing possible from sexy.

Because I didn't get any answers, any words for the experience, I was even more frightened. I assumed that it was some kind of a seizure, that I might be defective in some way. Maybe I wouldn't make a good wife because of it. Maybe Daniel wouldn't want me if he knew about it. And if there was one thing in the world that was even more terrifying than these night attacks, it was rejection, the fear of being cast off and unwanted, unloved again....just like when Mom had walked out the door and left me.

2010-06-08T16:11:00.000-07:00

After one of Daniel's weekend visits, Dad took Raphah and I to do the Sunday paper route, taking Daniel back home on the way back, because Daniel didn't have a car. He didn't like mechanization, and dreamed of a world in which everyone rode horses or rode in horsedrawn carts and carriages and sleighs. In a world of his making, everyone would have beautiful hand made things in their homes, no plastic at all, nothing mass produced. Every farm would have fences that flowed with the curves of the landscape, and trees would be planted in more natural formations instead of straight rows. A lot of his ideals were pretty unrealistic, but I admired and repsected him for being able to think outside the box, to dream, to come up with a vision for alternative to our throwaway, immediate gratification society.

After assembling enough papers to start the route, Raphah and I sat in the back of the Blazer, putting the rest of them together and stuffing them into bags. When we got to Laclede, all the men went for a bathroom break in the bushes by the post office. I couldn't, because there wasn't enough cover; even though it was still dark, there were lights all over the place, and I was very modest. Dad said I would have to wait until we got into Sandpoint, which would take at least an hour, because there were so many boxes to stop and fill on a Sunday morning. The time seemed to drag on forever, and embarrassing as it was, I asked him several times to stop anywhere in the countryside so I could run off into the woods and go, but he wouldn't let me. I really had to go, but he just ignored me after a while.

At Odd Fellows Plaza on the edge of Sandpoint, he made me get out to hand deliver several papers, as usual. There was a bathroom there, but he wouldn't let me use it. As soon as I stepped out into the cold air, my bladder gave out. After delivering the papers, I stepped behind a fence, took my jacket off and tied it around my waist, hoping it would hide the huge wet mark on my jeans, but since it was January, wearing a jacket around my waist was pretty conspicuous. When the Blazer came back to where I was, Daniel got out and opened the door for me, but I was so humiliated that I couldn't even look at him. When I did work up enough courage to glance quickly in his direction, he had a look on his face like he knew exactly what had happened. He didn't look disgusted, he just looked like he knew. I hopped quickly into the blazer, burning with shame. Dad looked back at me with a sneering smile and so did Raphah. With a sinking feeling in my stomach I realized that Daniel must know too. I was so upset that I started crying quietly with my head on my knees. In the front seat ahead of me, I heard Daniel asking Dad quietly if we could stop at a restroom yet. Dad made a noncommital grunt, looked out the window, and kept driving. He stopped and got out at one of the stops, and I felt something patting my knee. I peeked to see what it was; it was Daniel's hand patting my knee comfortingly . Oh no, he did know, he must! I was flooded with despair and couldn't help crying even more, feeling as though my entire body was leaking now.

After the whole route was complete, Dad stopped at the Dairy Depot gas station to buy gas. Daniel opened the door for me and I scrambled out. When I got out of the bathroom, I stood in the hall and waited for Raphah. Suddenly I saw a familiar blond head bobbing above the candy racks. Oh no, Daniel was coming our way! He came up near me andmade small talk. I stared numbly at the 7-Up machine in the corner and mumbled one or two word replies. Then he said something about how nice it was to have me for a friend.
"Yeah, it's nice to have friends", I said.
It was the only thing I could think of to say! He laughed quietly and said, "Come here", holding his arms out to me. He gave such nice hugs, as though he cherished me. While he held me, he talked about the toothpick incident, said that was when he'd started to like me, because he liked the way I'd handled what could have been a horrible scene if it'd happened to another girl my age. He chuckled again and told me he loved me. He said it in the most wonderful way, as if I were being sort of silly but he loved me anyway. Then Raphah came out and Daniel went in. When he emerged, we all went back to the Blazer.

Dad pulled out a brown paper sack and declared,
"Whoever guesses what's in here gets some!"

"It's candy!", shouted Daniel.

He was right; there were two boxes, one of the standard coffe nips, the other of chocolate parfait nips. Everything was happier then, and we snacked on the candy all the way back to Wrenco Loop. When Daniel was out and on his way walking up the road to his cabin, Dad turned and looked at me.

"So, Becky, did you have a nice bath?"

"Yeah Becky, chimed in Raphah, did you have fun wetting your pants?"

But I didn't care anymore. My ears were still ringing with the gentle words of Daniel. For days afterward, all the petty annoyances of our life didn't even touch me. I was floating along in a world of my own and my mind was with Daniel. He'd said that I was beautiful, and for the first time in my life, I almost believed it was true. "Intelligent", "determined", "strong", "different", "creative"...these were the words I was used to hearing people use to describe me. "Beautiful" was a word that was used for Sarah or my mother, and "cute" was a word for Rachel. Neither were ever used for me, but when he said them, they had a ring of truth. For once, there was someone in my life who valued me for who I really was, not what they hoped I might be someday if they changed me enough.

It seemed like forever before Dad brought him back again, even though it was only a week, but it was worth the wait. We had to get water that night, so Daniel, Raphah and I rode in the back of the truck with the drippy wet water barrels, but I didn't mind so much since he was with us. Once at Mark's house, we also had to shovel the driveway, which took us an hour or two. One the way back, Dad let us ride in the front. I rode in the middle with Raphah on my lap, and Daniel sat on the passanger's side with Sarah on his lamp. My thin leather gloves were worn through at the thumb and fingertips. We were riding along like that, packed in cozily, when I felt a big calloused hand take mine very gently and tenderly. When he realized I had a glove on, his fingers found the hole in the fingertips of my glove. I was sorry I'd left the glove on, but since I couldn't take it off, I slowly leaned my head over until it rested on his shoulder. He was all warm from working and smelled nice, a combination of vegetarian male, birch wood smoke, horse, and something else indescribable- the scent of Daniel. By and by, he leaned my way until his head was resting on mine.

I don't think Dad even noticed until he got out at the Tamrak convenience store and came back to the truck. Then he made Raphah and I get out and ride in the back. It was colder now than it had been before; Daniel took his coat and wooly white sweater off, laid the sweater down in the bed of the truck and covered me with his coat to keep the wind off of me. He only had on his favorite blue plaid shirt now. Despite being in the back of a truck in mid-February for over half an hour, I was warm and cozy all the way home. When the truck stopped, he hopped out quickly to help me out of the truck and make sure I wasn't cold! These small things endeared me to him. Even though Daniel was a rustic sort whose hands were covered with callouses and scars from farm labor, he always behaved as a gentleman and treated me like a lady. I had never been treated that way before, and after years of ridicule and taunting, hearing kind, sincere words spoken to me was more precious than any meterial thing could have been.