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Show 34 of horses. A full basement, we dug it all, and hauled all the sand and gravel for the concrete, mixed and poured all the concrete footings and floors, the walls and foundation. That winter Dad hired a carpenter and the two of them with Donald Best framed in the house, started the siding, the house coming together, from studs to walls, from sub-floors to finished oak. It had a big front porch for taking the cool of the evening, a big back porch glassed in to cut the winter wind where the milk would get separated and cooled, and there were two bedrooms upstairs and two down, kitchen, dining room, front room and all that basement with a special room for preserves. We were painting the house white and were proudly excited about it. As soon as school let out we were packed and ready to go. So I forgot the woman next door, I no longer dreamed of that androgynous buckskin girl in distress, I practically forgot Elizabeth. Leaving grade school and this house and that town all at once was like leaving childhood itself. On the second day of our moving when we were to take the last of it and that evening eat our first meal and spend our first night in the new house, I remembered Gay Paree just in time before my parents or, worse, Henry found it; I got it out of hiding, mixed in with a stack of Boy's Life, and wondered how to smuggle it along. Then, feeling I was beyond all that, on a wave of virtue I carried it out back and buried it in the trash pile. Only later did I regret it. At the time I felt clean and noble and I stopped to take in the morning as if it had been arranged for me. It was still early, as clear and fresh as a drop of dew on a rose in Eden, all about me I felt the hush of a new day awakening to the sun, such beauty that without thought or realizing it I grew hushed. Down the driveway through the June morning I walked, hearing the birds and smelling the woodsmoke of breakfast fires, lost to the morning, |