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Once I hear them, either on the page or in the shower, they move in. My whole family and all my friends have to live with them. I once called up my friend to complain, “That Dorrie is gonna get kicked out of school if she doesn’t start behaving. Now what am I gonna do with that girl?” Occasionally, I had to ask my son and his friend to do something Dorrie would do, smash a cup, burn some hair. I made him squirm and wriggle on the floor. I knew exactly what I would feed her every night.
When I was young, maybe ten, I cut a picture out of a magazine of a feisty-looking littel girl, barefoot on the dirt in the middle of some chickens, a wild thing. As a kid, I kept the photograph in my journal. For the past fifteen, twenty years, I have had her by my desk. Her face is turned toward the camera like she just got caught.
And Beulah? She teaches me—about raising a child, about handling a horse, about growing plants—to be who they are. She looks at their peculiar convolutions as signs, as messages from their souls, not as problems to cure. I often think to myself, “Now, what would Beulah do?”
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