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Show house/ JJ-00 by the bed. Below, people were yelling at their children as they bound shrubs into tight missiles, preparing for the winter. They behaved as"good"Mormons do, the father directing the children, the mother supervising from the kitchen doorway. I watched the father glance surreptitiously about as he lit the leaves, burning them within the city limits - a small crime. Something about his white shirt and his self-consciousness and the way his children clustered about him reminded me of my father. Smoke floated in circles, drifting toward me like signals of a life so similar - and yet so painfully different from my own. I remembered raking leaves when we lived at the white house. We all came out to rake on autumn Saturdays, all but the babies milling through the front yard with old brooms or battered bamboo rakes, stuffing mounds into wheelbarrows which the older boys wheeled to the pasture. The horses would dance and snort as we dumped the leaves in the twenty-foot circle of burned stubble. And then, when the lawn was smooth as a clean khaki blanket spread before the white house, we would race for the pasture for the moment we had been working all day for. We would take our places around the circle - a child for every ten degrees, watching as our father knelt on a gabardine knee, striking a kitchen match with his clean thumbnail. We had stood breathless and immobile as the flames licked up the mound to its summit. Then we would come up , finding places at the periphery for our freshly-dug potatoes or the last ears of garden corn wrapped in foil. |