The Bee Road

By Michel Strickland

At ninety-seven, Grace Campbell, a Scottish immigrant ranchers wife, has drawn strength from magic over the years; she has the gift of second sight. But now, shes been stolen away from the home she loves by her controlling son, Douglas. Even she cant see what her future holds, so she calls in the cavalry for help. Afraid and alone, Grace must now rely on her free-spirited granddaughter Georgiana to bring her back home to die.

But Georgiana has a few demons of her own to fight before she can help Grace.

At forty-seven, Georgiana has just managed to extricate herself from a disastrously abusive relationshipbut the price she paid for her own freedom was custody of the little stepdaughter she adores. She now questions whether life holds any meaning for her anymore, and she turns to her lost skills for comfort. She hopes that in the rediscovery of her love of pottery, she will learn to love herself again. As the restoration of her pottery studio nears completion, still wrestling with her own grief, she gets the call from her grandmother.

On the trip home, they are dogged by Douglas, who has obtained a court order to take his mother back to California. As they fight for Graces freedom and dignity, the two women learn things about themselves and each other. They are on a journey that will change both of their lives foreverone that will test their stamina, their determination, and their ability to believe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462024582

Michel Strickland

Michel Strickland is an advocate for at-risk youth who has created her own behavioral and cognitive restructuring program for anxiety disorders. She is working on her master's degree in equine-facilitated psychotherapy. She lives on an old farm in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, four horses, two dogs, and five cats.

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Contents

Chapter 1 Never, Never Land

Chapter 2 FEIFDOM LAND

Chapter 3 Through the Window

Chapter 4 Sanctuary

Chapter 5 Lost in the Cosmos

Chapter 6 Wild Horse Heaven

Chapter 7 Limbo Highway

Chapter 8 Whispers and Echoes and Things that Pass in the Night

Chapter 9 Warrior Women Sail with the Tide

Chapter 10 Gates of Joy

Chapter 11 Scottish Warrior Women

Chapter 12 Rainy Night in Georgia

Chapter 13 Snakes and Snails and Rattler Tales

Chapter 14 Warrior Women Forge On

Chapter 15 Of Wild Horses and Cowgirls

Chapter 16 Space Travelers

Chapter 17 Victorious

Chapter 18 Flying Horses and Daffodils

Chapter 19 Scottish Warrior Women in the Homeland

Chapter 20 2010

Chapter 1

Never, Never Land

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Grace

1967

How was I to know, that a day would come that I would turn to the man I‘d slept next to for the past forty-seven years, and wonder if I loved him. That I would look at his old face and know every line, every pore, every freckle and yet feel that I didn’t know him at all. That I would turn that eye upon myself and find myself a stranger hidden behind layers and layers of misty veils of time, like Salome. It was just a regular June day like so many others, driving up The Bee Road to the slopes of our mountain with the sun shining down and the last of the spring balsam fading dull yellow against luminous green. It had been a cool rainy spring and the grassy hillsides resplendent in patches of Widow Grass, purple Lupine, Harebell, and Blue Flags; beneath the soaring trees the deep reds and pinks of Sour Grass, Wild Ginger, Starflower and Columbine. It was almost too glorious to look at. Like a peaceful forest scene turned garish and dreamlike.

Come to think of it, everything around me, including my thoughts were oddly surreal; as if I’d had one too many glasses of my elderberry wine. I tried to shake off the feeling, but I just couldn’t seem to clear my head. I tried squeezing my eyes shut against hot light, but the jostling of the truck made it difficult to balance with my eyes closed. We were just driving along as we had so many, many times before. Driving up the mountain to take the bees to the honey run. Then suddenly, and without warning, I looked at Liam and asked myself a question that I’d dared not ask myself in too long to remember. When was the last time I’d looked at him and felt my heart swell for the love of him? My heart dropped like a stone in my belly, at the knowing of it, at the wondering. There I was, after all those years, asking myself the unthinkable. Do you still love him, Grace? Do you still? The truck jostled and rattled up the old road, and the dust rose around us, and the forest closed in.

I knew I’d loved him before and after the births of our six children. I had loved him as I sat upon the hay wagon and drove the big horses while he and the boys walked beside and tossed up bale after endless bale of hay beneath a sMimsding white sky; a merciless central Oregon summer sun that seared their fair Scottish faces and sucked the color from their hair.

I loved him that day forty-seven years before, that I’d held a nosegay of violets and stood before a judge with my handsome American sailor and vowed my eternal love and obedience, to honor and cherish him, in sickness and in health until death do us part. I’d been so sure of my love then for it had filled me up, like a cup overflowing, it t’was.

When I met Liam I’d met my destiny. We’d joined hands and joined our lives, never to be parted. And I’d done it whole heartedly, with nothing held in reserve, for though I’d been a mere lass of eighteen, I certainly knew my destiny when I came upon it. I knew how to be a wife. No one had to tell me that. I knew how to keep a house, and how to tend a child. I knew who I was when I was twenty.

But the day came in my sixty-seventh year, as we rattled along that narrow track through the trees; a moment, an instant, when I’d looked at his work hardened hand upon my knee, and the familiar curves and angles of his profile, and suddenly not known anything about anything. We just kept bouncing along in that horrible old truck of his, carrying a dozen bee hives up the mountain, me and this old man that I suddenly felt a stranger.

We were late taking the bees to the sweet clover bloom, because Liam had been having trouble with his blood pressure that spring. The doctor had ordered him to take it easy, but that was nay impossible for a man like Liam, so accustomed he was to rising with the sun and heading out into the day, his work schedule written into the rhythms of his life like seconds and minutes on a clock.

He’d spent the early spring riding the new recliner our son Douglas had given him for Christmas, and reading his fix-it magazines and making notes and drawings of everything needing to be done and just how he was going to do it. And then suddenly it was June and he knew the sweet clover would be blooming and the berries and the fireweed soon after, and he couldn’t bear the thought of his bees missing the honey run on the near slopes of Mt. Hood.

So we closed up a dozen of the hives in the night while the bees were sleeping, and loaded them up in the darkness, and headed up the Bee Road, leaving before the first light of dawn in the early cool of the morning. I brought the blood pressure cuff and the stethoscope so that I could monitor his blood pressure. I knew I couldn’t stop him from going, but I couldn’t let him go alone and blow his stack somewhere up there in the forest with no one to find him until it was too late.

You’d think by my worrying so about him that I must surely love him. I reminded myself of that as I flung his old paw off my leg. Truth be told, I couldn’t imagine my life without him, but is that love? What had become of us? He irritated the hell out me and when he leered at me with his old faded blue eyes. It never moved me to lay down with him. Never. Never in a very, very long time. I can’t remember when he’d become such a nuisance to me.

I couldn’t remember anything that made a wit of sense to me in that moment, bouncing along in that horrid beast of a truck, the entire dust of that forest service road swirling into the cab, grinding between my teeth, and sticking to the sweat on my face and neck. I wiped my face with a pretty hanky.

Why don’t you put some new springs on this truck! I grumbled.

It’s a truck, not a damn funeral hearse. He said, mimicking my Scottish brogue. He was always comparing anything of luxury to funeral parlors and funeral hearses and funeral dinners. Anything nice and easy stunk of death to my Liam. He lived in a world of hard work and hard times. Made the good times all the sweeter, he claimed, if life didn’t roll along too easy. He measured the quality of his life by how much pain it gave him.

If the house was cold in the morning, and he had to go out and chop wood, carry it in and start a fire with those old fingers, stiff from the cold and arthritis, the warmth felt all the better; as if he had earned the right to it. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to listen to him rant and rave about folks letting a damn thermostat on a furnace decide when to come on and off.

Fire goes out when folks are snuggled warm beneath the covers, he’d say. Man gets up and if he can’t see his breath, he just puts in a coupl’a sticks, enough to heat the coffee water and fry up some eggs. Then he don’t hang out next to the fire. He goes to work.

Monday, Tuesday, Saturday, Sunday … day of the week made no difference to my Liam. Every day was an opportunity to get something that needed getting done, got done. And if all the getting was got, then he just might make me a new table, or some of those nice cherry wood bowls he liked to turn on the lathe Douglas had gotten him for Christmas years ago.

It was God awful hot that day, though it was still hours before the noon hour. We were afraid for the bees, though Liam kept saying they’d be cool enough there in the back of the truck beneath the white canvas tarps. But they were closed into those hives and they wouldn’t last long in this heat. So we didn’t stop for rest from the bumping and the jarring, and we didn’t try to talk over the rattling of the truck; and if we had thought about talking, what would we say after forty-nine years in each other’s company?

I peered out through the cloud of dust we were stirring up, to the wooded slopes, white wreathed with bloom. It sure looked to be a good serviceberry year with all those flowers and the spring rain; elderberries and maybe huckleberries too. I told myself that I’d have to try and get up there when the berries came on.

It’d been years since I’d made a batch of serviceberry jam. Not since Liam started growing those new boysenberries. I could hardly keep up with those berries of his. Seemed that when he turned seventy he’d traded in his cattle for bees and berries. Bees, berries and rhubarb. A lifetime of bucking hay, pulling Mimsves, moving irrigation pipe and what sense did it make now?

Bees, berries and rhubarb. Just a half dozen cows on a square mile of forest and pasture and one young cow horse, so full of piss and vinegar that the only one who’d ride it was my granddaughter, Georgie. Had a way with horses she did. She Called it her cow horse and true enough, it was no secret who the horse had been intended for.

I wiped my face again. I could’ve told Liam that it was hot and that I was thirsty and my body ached from the jouncing and jarring and if we didn’t get there soon I would scream. All my life I’d gotten that feeling off and on. Like there was a pressure building up inside of me and I was just going to start screaming some day and scream and scream until there was nothing left of me but me old housedress.

I could’ve told Liam that but he wouldn’t have believed me. He knew that I wouldn’t scream. I would endure, right along side of him, whatever misery owned us at the moment. He put his hand on my leg again and I tossed it off.

Why do you keep doing that? You know it’s too hot to put your hand on me.

"I was thinking about that time we brought a picnic up here. And afterwards we laid down on the blanket and …

Oh, go on with ya now! That was forty years ago! You know damn well that if I laid down and spread my legs just the sight of it would probably kill you. Especially in this heat.

He snorted and then laughed.

Can you just see it now! Me old skinny legs up in the air and all this silver hair flowing out around me. Like an old witch!

Like my Goddess! He smiled a toothless grin. Why wouldn’t he wear those teeth of his? They cost a pretty penny just to sit around soaking in a glass of water. I thought of that picnic day so long ago. A day much like this one. How his teeth had flashed white and straight and so lovely in the sunshine.

We’d left the baby with his mother and we’d driven the team up the mountain to bring the hives. A beautiful June day like this one it was, though not nearly so hot. And half way through the lunch he looked at me with those devilish blue eyes of his, his red hair a sparkling flame in the sunlight, and my heart had stopped in my chest when he reached for me. My heart didn’t stop for him anymore, though he kept reaching for me; kept needing me in a way that I didn’t need him.

He kept slowing down as if to stop, looking up at the hillsides, then driving on. Only Liam would know which one was the perfect hillside. And then there it was, and even I could see that it was the right one. A huge expanse of open ground, clear cut, burned over, teeming with the delicate feathery golden mounds of sweet clover, pierced through with tall green spikes of fireweed fat with scarlet buds and white clouds of bear grass.

This is it, Mother, he said climbing out. He was a stocky man, strong and spry as any man half his age. But the muscle and the determination and the razor sharp mind, disguised the fragility of his seventy-six year old heart. And I knew it. Things were going awry inside him. The doctor had said so. Said Liam’s arteries were turning to stone and his blood pressure so high, he was a ticking bomb.

I’m not your mother, I said, wearily climbing down, so relieved to be standing still, with just the sound of the breeze whispering through the Douglas firs on my side of the road. I moved away and stood holding myself, looking down across the treetops and the hills below us, and the rolling plains of wheat, far, far beyond, laying in the haze of early heat.

Liam started taking the hives out of the truck.

Are you gonna help me or just stand there gawking?

Just stand here gawking … it being so pretty and all! Look how purple the Larkspur is this year. Tis so purple it’s almost black, it tis.

He laughed. You’re a walkin’ encyclopedia of flowers! I can’t remember a time that he’d ever been angry with me. That’s not true. There was once. And it frightened me. It did. But it had only been the once and never came again. I let my eyes soar down the wind with a golden eagle, spiraling down and away, and over the hilltops. I could almost feel the wind through my feathers.

If I didn’t look at the patches of clear cut; if I only looked at what remained of the old growth trees, it was almost as if time had stood still here in the mountains, and out there, on the plains. As if no time at all had passed between that day so many years ago, when we were young and our whole life stretched out before us.

I felt myself yearning for that time, a powerful ache that just came over me. I wasn’t mourning the loss of days I had already lived. I was mourning the loss of the ones that I hadn’t. I could hear him unloading the hives. I knew I should help him… but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to move. Didn’t want to feel the pull of gravity against my old bones. I wanted to stand here and stare out into the never never and dream.

I closed my eyes and just listened beyond the knock and the bang of the wood against metal, and listened to the breeze soughing through those tall trees, and the faint cries of a hawk, and the brittle chirping of Juncoes and chipmunks there on the edge of never never.

And my head must’ve dropped because when I opened my eyes I was looking down at the edge of the road where a wagon road twisted down through the dark trees; a road I’d not noticed until just that moment. And I was overcome by that queer feeling of deja vu, as if I’d been there before, down that very road, or stood in this very spot looking down it, though I knew I hadn’t ever.

There’s a road just here, Liam. Liam! I shouted. His hearing wasn’t good, even with the two hearing aids that Douglas had bought for him.

He turned to me when I shouted again. A road! I think I might have a walk down it!

What if I blow my stack? He Called back. I was always telling him to be careful, lest he blow his stack.

I’ll be back soon. You won’t be wandering far if your stack is blown.

He laughed in reply, then shouted. We could have that picnic when you get back!

I didn’t bring a picnic!

I wasn’t talkin’ about the food! I could hear him laughing still as I walked down the road, round a curve and out sight. Can you imagine what someone would think if they were to come upon us there, with my skirts lifted up over my head, and that old coot there between my skinny legs, trying to squish that soft old pecker into a well long gone dry?

I laughed out loud and my voice sounded so out of place, there in the dark coolness of the deep forest. There amid the ferns and the brambles, the vine maples, and the Douglas firs, and towering cedars with long weeping boughs. Not even the birds dared sing there.

It felt good to walk. My legs were good strong legs. I’d been blessed with a strong body and I thanked the Lord for it every day. And I thanked him double when my monthly stopped and I knew that I’d never be pregnant again. I never minded it like other women. I was glad. I felt as if I was getting a new and different life.

But of course I wasn’t. It was the same life. A good life, I tell you. I’m not complaining. A good full life. And I was happy to wake to it each and every morning. And it was easy to look away from the secret room inside my mind, where lost dreams slept and secret desires lived behind locked doors. Easy to embrace the real and the immediate, the life that I had.

I walked down that road, crossing back and forth over the wagon ruts. And I kept having that feeling that I knew where I was going. A tickle of fear excited me, drove me on, further than I’d thought to go. And I realized that I was expecting something up ahead. A line from an old Robert Frost poem went through my mind.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I … I took the one less traveled. Not I, I reminded myself. I’d not taken the road less traveled. I had taken the well worn road that traveled alongside Liam. I started humming Onward Christian Soldiers as the trail curved downhill. Before I even got to the bottom I knew that I was going to come upon a beautiful meadow in the woods. I just knew it. I could see it plain as day in my mind, even around the words of the hymn I was singing softly, reverently.

Marching as to war… 

There would be a little white clapboard house standing in the very center of the meadow, surrounded by a picket fence covered with climbing roses. With the cross of Jesus going on before …  I don’t know how I knew it. How did I ever know any of the things I knew before I should’ve? My mother had Called it fey and it had frightened me all my life. Whatever it was, gift or curse, I had it. I knew there would be a house with an apple tree in the front yard, and a pear tree in the back.

Christ our royal leader … 

I grew more excited with every step I took, until finally I couldn’t hold myself back and I started to run. I came around a curve in the road and there it was! Just as I had imagined it. A big green meadow surrounded by dark forest, firs, pine, spruce and a few old cedars. And there, right smack dab in the center of the meadow, was that house, blinding white in the sun, and a little white picket fence going all the way around. I stopped dead in my tracks, shielding my eyes from the brightness, so bright like a dream, or a vision, gasping to catch my breath, my heart hammering in my ears.

My mind struggled to make sense of it all. It was so white, so bright, it looked like heaven. With the light sparklin’ like fairy dust all around it. MagiMims, like. How could this be? How could there be a house here? This was National Forest land. No one lived here. Then I thought, of course, it had to be a ranger’s house. A forest ranger’s house. And it was so charming.

Nothing so strange after all. I knew I was fey. Everyone had always said so. I’d just had a little foresight about the house. That’s all. There was nothing too terribly strange about that. The house was so utterly charming. It looked just like the houses that were built when I was a child. As if enchanted by the scene before my eyes, I stumbled forward, without giving much thought to what I would say should someone be home.

There was the apple tree in the yard, just as I’d known it would be. Smoke curled up from the chimney and that made me notice that it wasn’t hot anymore. The sky was clear blue, and a cool breeze had blown off the heat. I suddenly realized I was standing at the fence, my hand resting on the gate beneath an arbor of climbing roses. Their sweet smell perfumed the air. And there were my favorite Dahlias growing in the flowerbed.

I just couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that I’d been here before. I’d stood beneath these roses and smelled their fragrance. I’d run my hands through the soil of those garden beds and set out the Dahlia bulbs in spring. I’d been here and in that house. It was like I knew the people who lived there, though I knew I didn’t, couldn’t have named them or described them. Suddenly it was as if the house came to life. I could hear movement inside; dishes rattling, someone humming. I started to turn away when I heard someone inside Call out my name!

Grace! Come set the table for dinner!

I was utterly shocked right down to the soles of my feet. That voice. It touched something, some distant memory. And then a woman’s dark silhouette peering through the screen door. I couldn’t make out her face.

Grace is that you? Time to clean up and get ready for dinner. Your daddy’ll be home any minute now. Where did you get yourself off to? I stood rooted to the ground as the woman disappeared back into the house. My daddy wasn’t coming. He’d been dead since I was just a small child back in Scotland. And my mother dead for almost as many years. Neither had ever set foot on American soil.

I hope you haven’t soiled that clean dress already! the woman Called from inside, and suddenly there was laughter and two little girls ran from around the house and right up to me. Just like they knew me; like they were expecting me. They were little girls in ankle length dresses and high buttoned shoes.

Mama’s been lookin’ all over for you! the biggest one said.

And it’s your turn to set the table and I’m not doin’ it for you! the smaller one said, opening the gate. I didn’t know what to say. I was so confused. I knew those people, and yet I didn’t. Couldn’t. I suddenly realized that the older girl was looking DOWN at me, and I gasped and stepped backwards, feeling much shorter than I had just the moment before.

Either those were very big little girls or I had shrunk. I was afraid to look down, and when I did I whimpered in surprise and shock. My housedress had turned into a long pale blue dress with a starched gingham pinafore. And my hands! They were the hands of a child! Small and soft and tan and unlined. The fingers no longer gnarled with arthritis, but straight and true. I put my hands to my face and it too felt as smooth as a baby’s bottom.

I think I cried out, I’m not sure, but I staggered back. I was certain I must’ve died! How else to explain this? I’d surely had a stroke and died and this was heaven. This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t be real. I had to be imagining it all. I had to be dreaming and I would wake up and everything would be as it was before. I pinched myself but the dream went on. Nothing made sense anymore. And I realized that nothing had really made sense since the moment I’d walked away from Liam’s old blue truck.

Don’t pretend like you’re sick again! the littlest girl said, and took my hand. Mama said your theatrics won’t work anymore. When it’s your turn it’s your turn and you have to do it even if you’re dying!

The bigger girl laughed. They took my hands and tried to pull me through the gate, but I suddenly had the overwhelming feeling that I had come too close to some imaginary boundary and that if I went a step closer to that house, something terrible would happen.

Overcome with fear, I jerked my hands free and whirled around, taking off at a run towards the forest, running as fast as my legs could carry me. The girls screamed in delight and ran after me.

Those new young legs of mine ran like the wind. I couldn’t remember when I’d last felt so vital and strong and swift. It felt wonderful even as it frightened me. I ran like a terrified rabbit. I ran across the meadow and into the darkness of the forest, and then I suddenly stopped.

The girls bumped into me from behind. I had that eerie feeling again. I turned around and this time, when I looked at them, they were no longer strangers. Hannah and Nell, I whispered. Hannah and Nell. My sisters? But they were no kin of mine. I had two brothers. No sisters.

Hannah, the oldest, said, You look like you seen a ghost. What’s the matter with you? Settin’ the table ain’t so bad as all that. What’s wrong with you?

Yeah! Nelly said.

Hannah, I said in wonder, looking up into the taller girl’s eyes, then touching her face. And Nelly! I turned to the shorter girl. Little Nelly, I whispered.

The two girls looked at each other and shrugged.

Then I suddenly thought of something else. The cathedral! I shouted, heading for a place in the trees I knew would be there.

What about it? Nelly Called after me.

It’s just ahead there, I told her, still walking, and suddenly realizing that my voice held no trace of my heavy Scottish brogue.

Same place it was yesterday and the day before! Hannah yelled after me. What do you want me to tell Mama? That you’ve gone to the cathedral instead of coming in to dinner? That you’re gonna stand out here and sing to the trees again until it gets dark?

I had to see it. The girls fell in behind me. It was just as I knew it would be. A towering circle of ancient cedar trees, tall as skyscrapers and each as big in diameter as a house. And beneath them, a quiet, dark round room with a mossy floor.

I knew it, I whispered. The girls ran into me from behind when I stopped. But I didn’t mind. I fell to my knees in reverence. I knew this place. This holy sacred place. The feeling of divinity here brought tears to my eyes. It was like nothing I’d ever felt in any church, in any magnificent cathedral. It was a holy place there in the forest where God dwelt. Where I could feel him thinking. Feel him breathing.

You’d better pray! Hannah said, seeing me there on my knees. You’d better pray that Mama doesn’t take that razor strop to your bottom.

Nelly laughed.

I knew it, I said to myself, rising to my feet.

You knew what? Hannah shouted at me, because I’d taken off running again, to see something else I remembered.

And over there! I yelled back to them. The creek! The mill pond Daddy made and the mill!

They ran to keep up. They thought I’d lost my mind. What is wrong with you? they yelled from behind.

Sure enough. I came to the edge of a pond and stopped. There was a stone wall, turning the creek into a beautiful little round pond there beneath the tall trees. On the far side was a little wooden mill house, the mill wheel turning in the current. Then the water splashed down onto the rocks below.

I knew it. I just knew it. I’d seen it before. I’d been here before. Many, many times before. I’d been there with Hannah and Nell and … our father.

I give up! Hannah shouted, turning to leave. I’m going back. You’re crazy, Grace Anne. And Mama’s gonna come after you and whup you this time.

Yeah! echoed Nell. She’s gonna whup you.

I watched them leave. Twelve year old Hannah, straight and tall and plain faced, with long pale blonde braids and pale blue eyes. Ghost eyes, I’d always Called them. And little Nell. Five years old. Round and dimpled and beautiful by anyone’s standards. How I loved them. My little sisters. Could it be that God was showing me the sisters that I would’ve had, should’ve had, had my father not gotten drunk while hunting and accidentally shot himself? Had my mother not worked herself to death, a young woman with many more children inside her womb, waiting to be born?

I turned away from them. The very idea of it was too sweet and too painful to bear. I fell to my knees there next to the millpond and looked upon my reflection in the still waters. There was my own young beautiful face. My nose was small and pert. My gray eyes wide and sparkling. My long wavy platinum hair hanging in shimmering waves across my shoulders. I hadn’t seen that face in a very, very long time. I thought I had lost that face forever. It was my face. The face that lived inside of me in spite of what the mirror showed me each day. I touched it in awe.

Aye, but you were a beauty, I whispered. Then I felt the fear taking hold of my heart again. What’s happening to me? I asked the sky. What is happening? This can’t be real. It has to be a dream. I’ve never been here. Never. Those aren’t my sisters. I have no sisters. That’s not my mother. My mother died in 1907 when I was only seven years old.

But I’m nine now, I thought. No! I’m not nine. When I was nine years old I lived in Scotland. I’m sixty-seven years old. I sat back on my heels. I’m sixty-seven years old and I’ve lost my mind.

I stood up and started slowly back towards the house, feeling shaky and scared, like a lost little girl. The sky was suddenly growing dark. What had happened to the day? Lights shown warmly from the windows of the house and smoke rose from the chimney. I walked slowly. I saw the log barn, the smoke house, the chicken coup, the privy. All just as I knew they would be. But HOW had I known? How could this be?

I looked down at my brown high buttoned shoes, my skinny legs were encased in black cotton stockings. I had been a skinny girl and a skinny woman. All my life, skinny as a rail. Couldn’t be helped. I ate like horse, Liam would tell you. Dessert, too. But I never gained nor lost a pound. My one saving grace was my beautiful big bosom.

I looked down quickly, grabbed at my chest. Flat from collar bone to my knobby knees! I flexed those knees, testing the spring of youth in my legs, the lightness in my step in spite of my fear. How could this happen? I was young. I was strong. I could run like the wind. I took off running through the lengthening shadows towards the little white house at the center of the meadow, the center of the universe it seemed to me.

I reached the gate beneath the bower of climbing roses, gasping for breath, yet the hand that rested upon the gate was still young and smooth. I was still that younger version of myself.

Grace! I heard the woman Call from inside. Get in here now or face the music, child! I couldn’t help but smile. It was just like my mother.

Mama? I whispered, and started forward, as if enchanted. But something stopped me, held me back, froze my heart with fear. I suddenly remembered who I was. I backed up. It occurred to me that I was being tempted by the devil. And if that was true, if I gave in to the temptation and set foot into that yard, that different, new young life, with all the choices to make over again … . Maybe it was all a test. Maybe all that really awaited me on the other side of that gate was fire and brimstone.

The devil comes in many guises, the pastor had said on many occasions. But in the guise of young girls named Hannah and Nelly? I sank to my knees, shaking my head. I so desperately wanted to walk through that gate. To step into this life which I had glimpsed.

Had the devil guessed my secrets? Did he know my regrets? Had he read my mind so accurately when I had scrupulously kept my thoughts so free of dreams and temptation for so many years. Could he see into that secret room in my heart? Only God or the devil could know what this temptation meant to me. I dropped my