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Show Moon - 24 Sometimes we traveled all the way to Aunt Alice's in Maryland. She was a pretty woman, a softer version of Ruth, with great round blue eyes and hair curling like feathers around her face. Her house smelled of lemon and lavender. In that house I lived in fear of germs and dust, afraid to sit deeply in the chairs or to move without thinking carefully. Alice cooked delicious meals, which we were allowed to enjoy decorously after interminable prayers for the poor unfed, the poor unbaptized, the poor us miserable sinners. To Ruth's dismay-and perhaps this was the point-Alice was a born-again Christian. My mother left me at Alice's one day in the dead of winter and didn't come back until late spring, I didn't know why. She must have stayed with James at some Army base, but I thought of this only years later. Aunt Alice's daughters hadn't been born yet. Her husband, my uncle Paul, whom I'd met only briefly, wasn't there that I remember. I think he was in the Pacific commanding some ship. Alice didn't like to talk about the war or to talk about much of anything besides housework and Jesus. She had many rules, and I spent my time at her house afraid to touch the things in the world that delighted my eye. What, I wondered, had I done so wrong that my mother would leave me? Spring came, and I sat one morning hunched alone in Alice's garden, closed off from the new life of the world. Aunt Alice saw me like that, and she took me into her arms as if, in the first freshening of spring, something was released in her. At first I sat like a stone, but her arms were surprisingly warm, her breath like crushed mint from her garden, and finally I lay against her. After that, her garden became a magical woman's place. My eyes opened to the white buds on the crab apple tree and the herbs foaming in the shadows. She noticed |