Flesh to a skeleton, my home was filled with wide open airspace where barn swallows had once swooped. My mother said that while pregnant with me she woke up most mornings to the soft whir of bat wings returning home to the eaves above her head. Each of the three floors had open space to the floor below, which let me call to my parents on the third floor in the night. I slept in my own second floor room, sky-blue-painted with white clouds. For my fifth birthday my father made me a bed painted as a sunset over an ocean, with clouds. The ground floor was linoleum on concrete. There were no walls on the ground floor--our kitchen, dining room, living room all blended together. The stairs to the second floor were made of 2x4's which creaked at every step. The second floor had bedrooms, the bathroom, the picture window where I watched mist. Early in the morning, mist looked like waves of cotton candy in the valley below. I could only watch the mist through late spring and summer, because the sun began rising too late for me to see it before school. The third floor, my parents' floor, covered only two-thirds of the second. The stairs to it were extremely steep and narrow, made of hardwood. My parents' bed sat under a diamond- shaped window, on the opposite end of the floor from the chimney as it came through on its way to the roof. We heated the house with a furnace and woodstove. I spent nine years waking up to fields outside my window.

In the spring of 1979, I was six, and my brother David was born. My parents came downstairs at 5:07 a.m. and woke me up. I sleepily rode to my baby-sitter's house. Madelaine Merz had taken care of me since before I could speak--but she couldn't tell me what was happening as the day went on, as I waited past my normal time to leave. My father called as the sun set and told me the name of my little brother, and that I could spend the night at the Merz's. We played the board game "Life", drank soda (an uncommon treat to me then), and ate buttered salted popcorn. One day before, my family was only three--somehow now we were four. I came home the next day to a house lit only by the rain outside and the smile on my father's face.

Spring rains brought scents out of the plants surrounding my house. Last year's grass, soggy and matted down, spilled out a rich green smell, banishing the dry sandy odor of the day before. Crown vetch, pretty with its purple and white flowers but voracious enough to be called "the kudzu of the north", grew on the embankment down from our driveway. It covered the ground in a mat thick enough to jump and roll on. I picked the flowers from the long, stringy stems, and brought them in to put in water. I picked lamb's quarters, a wild-growing weed which we cooked like spinach and ate for dinner. My father and I planted 50 baby pine trees, which would someday, he said, be a windbreak for the house. I couldn't imagine these fragile saplings ever being strong enough to send the wind from my home. My sneakers were soaked from walking over the grass; I found bones of dead possums, shovels left out from last year. My toes squelched as I walked inside.

During spring everything in my house seemed moist and fertile. The wooden beams swelled and creaked in the night. Houseplants which had spent the winter indoors moved outside to catch the rains. The linoleum floor was cold to my feet as I took off my wet sneakers.

As spring's days lengthened into summer, my mother spent more and more of her time in her garden. David came out too, in his screened-over bassinet. While my Mama knelt and planted, I stood over David, listening to his coos over the bird calls. His hands were tiny, his feet ridiculously big. His snores at night buzzed over the wall to my room. David demanded attention while outside; I was always able to make him laugh. His chirping made my mother raise her head and smile at us. She opened seed packets for corn, peas, beans, pumpkins, broccoli, released their contents into rows framed half by electric fencing, half by wild raspberries. Walking into them meant scratches and blood, but it also meant finding the sweet red raspberries mixed with blackcaps to make purple hands and tongue. Cows sometimes got loose into the adjoining fields and lowed over the electric fence's clicking as current snapped through it. I touched the fence once, out of curiosity, and jumped as my fingers convulsed. The feeling of something else moving my body was inexplicable and frightening. I retreated to the safety of a row of strawberries and worked my way down it as I'd seen my mother do, weeding and kneeling in the dark soil. When I finished the row it was 7 o'clock, late for dinner. The globe of light over the table was on, and the smells of fresh cooked beans and rice reached to the door as I came in. I came down the four stairs to the linoleum floor from the red-tiled entry way. My body was wilting from exhaustion, but I smiled, ecstatically proud to have finished weeding a whole row of strawberries.

When my parents went out, they brought baby-sitters to stay with me. Kay Salmon liked the Beatles and let me watch TV, something my mother frowned at. I stayed up late and ran to my room only when Aloria, our metallic silver VW Rabbit, started up the driveway. I lay under the covers fully clothed, casually draping my hand over my mouth to hide the smile sure to come when my mother came up to check on me. The sounds she and my father made coming in reminded me of all the rules I had broken. The weather stripping on the door made a swish as it closed. I waited for footsteps on the stairs.

We passed the summer solstice and moved into fall. The trees across the valley began changing color, and we started keeping summer-opened windows closed to stay warm. School began again. Every morning I left the house and walked down the driveway to wait for the school bus. Mr. Reber drove, a scary man who I never imagined could smile. Our chickens began coming inside the chicken coop more regularly to sleep--as I left the coop after closing it up, I walked by the windmill and cistern, hearing the creaks as the autumn winds turned the mill west, south. My mother spent weekends covering our butcher-block counters with canning jars, then filling the jars with tomato sauce and with beans. We stored them in the root cellar, a sandy-floored extension into the hillside. The cellar smelled of dry sand and soil. The radio spoke of first frost, and the smell of wood smoke permeated the house. I began to unload wheelbarrows-ful of wood and carry it from the entryway to the wood stack along the wall near the stove.

In mid-October we would get our first snow, and winter entered in earnest in the beginning of November. Mr. Reber and the school bus dreaded the hill leading to my house--many days I returned to the breakfast table red- nosed, joyful to be left behind. I walked inside and upstairs past our greenhouse to my room. The plants sat and absorbed sun on a floor of red terra-cotta tiles. On winter days I walked past the plants and felt summer heat blasting. I spent hours on the third floor spreading my Legos out over the sun-warmed carpet. Looking out the windows made me squint at the snow--it was much easier to keep my eyes inside. My mother and I would sled down the dormant fields, every time carving a new track in the powder. When I went inside, everything looked pink; I stumbled going down the entryway steps because the air seemed filled with red smoke and I couldn't see. After I'd taken a bath with David, I'd wrap him up in a towel and come downstairs bearing the latest in a series of "special packages" for my mother. Her voice rang with surprise as she opened the towel to find a BABY in there! I sat in a rocking chair with a towel around me and held my feet as close to the black cast iron stove as I dared. The maker's mark said "Kickapoo Stove Works," for the Kickapoo river valley we lived next to.