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Show in my father's house/ 251 get them off! They'll kill you!" I smiled sheepishly,remembering how I ran screaming because they broke as I pulled their sticky bodies from mine, leaving half a sucking bit of slime and a trickle of blood down my leg. And then, when I calmed, how easily I scraped them off with my fingernail flinging them into the dust like I had done with my classmates in Nevada, once I controlled my fear. And yet I needed people, people from the world. The changes at the white house threatened like a cracked glass to break and cut both my memories of wholeness and my hopes for the future, but I worried about the upcoming school year. If we stayed in the area, I would attend junior high school with the children of my kindergarten class, and I longed for anonymity, for a chance to be gauged on my own merits. I felt I could only be acceptable to the world if no one judged me by my parents' way of life. My parents' way of life. When did I start thinking of the Principle that way? When did it stop being my way, and become their responsibility, their choice, their fault? At the end of summer, we moved across town to a red brick cottage with a big back yard and lilac bushes hugging the house - and my own room. For the first time in my thirteen years, I didn't sleep with my mother or double up with my little brother. Moderately well-to-do people lived around us - nice people with barbered yards and clean children who gave no special significance to the name "Allred" and who applied polygamy to a remote corner of Church history. From the day we moved in, I felt at home there. As soon as we settled in, my brothers moved from Nevada. Saul often took time from his studies at the University to chat with me. "if i followed in Daddy's footsteps, I'd have to be a pathologist so I wouldn't have to deal with people's pain," he said. |
