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Show in my father's house/ 250 Elsa's Christine - to receive my father's praise. None of them revealed the shy, inadequate feelings that held me near the door? seated aside, watching, always watching and wondering what was amiss. Among other things, I felt Aunt LaVona's absence at our family gatherings, my heart always expecting her arrival the way a tongue probes the hole of an extracted tooth, though the mind knows full well the tooth is gone. After one meeting I heard the mothers whispering about Aunt LaVona's oldest girl, Angela, engaged to an unbeliever. "Worldly" the mothers had called her concern with clothes and make-up and boys outside the group. "It's ridiculous," Aunt Sarah confided. "She starts laying out in March, before the snow is even melted, so she'll be tan. And now...." She shook her head mournfully- I longed to talk with Angela, to understand her choice. Perhaps like Saul, she questioned the Prophet, the Book of Mormon, and all the basic principles. Or perhaps, like me, she felt she didn't get enough. Enough of what? What was it that I missed? What was it that I needed? I waded in the stream where once a dozen other children swam with me. The swimming hole no longer covered me, no longer provided a dark, cool cloak against the heat. Hammers split the silence of the pasture, and new houses loomed above the swamp where Danny and I once speared carp and pulled leaches from our ankles. I gazed at dead marsh grass surrounding stacks of brick and lumber, and could almost hear Danny yelling, "Get them off, |
