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Show breakfast I kept looking up to where that branch pointed at me like an accusii 16 My father rented our house from his father, Granddad Brocken. After the house on the farm, it was splendor itself. I loved that house on the farm, shelter from the storm, and on warm summer days lying on my bed petting a stretched-out cat, but the big kitchen-dining room had been added later, had a flat roof, and one night the wind tore a huge branch from one of the three cottonwoods which stood in front, tossed it down on that roof, and a smaller branch stabbed through the ceiling. The next morning while I ate inp finger. It never occurred to me that I couldAhave interpreted it as a sign from above which singled me out for greatness. The next December the house burned down and we moved to town 4trt* where I found the kind of comfort I later associated with the fall of Rome. No longer did I have to take the path to the outhouse, wade through snow and pull down my pants at 10 to sit on a seat the same temperature--I can feel it still. Of course Rome never got half as far into decadence as we are now. Now I can sit on a cushioned John seat in a warm bathroom with a tile floor, with a tub big enough for two, with two sinks and a discrete fan to draw away my odors, and use a double-ply toilet tissue which is so soft but also strong so that never does my finger poke through. Lately though, sometimes, on those rolls the two plys slip, come apart so that when I tear off a few squares they are not lined up and I have to adjust them before I fold them. Of course I complain; it's a terrible inconvenience, it shouldn't happen. And then I remember sitting at 10° and less in that outdoor privy, the only benefit that the smell was frozen to a minimum, and wiping myself with slick cold pages from a Monkey Wards catalog. The pages differ, you'll notice. Women's dresses and things like that are on paper a lot slicker and more brittle than pages like the index or ones featuring ammunition. It didn't |