Bizarre, A Life

Strafford ¹Not Stratford., Missouri
In the back of the RV, my sister and I sit up to watch Fate slide toward us.  

It is night, a full moon, and the historic southern Missouri ice storm of 1990 has transformed our new neighborhood into one big skating rink. We are trapped in the parked RV. Our parents made it inside the house to cook soup, just as our neighbor from the house on top of the hill, directly across from us, stepped out his front door. Using shovels as crutches, one lodged under each armpit, he dug into the ice and little by slipping-and-stumbling little, he made it to his car. Astounded, we watched him climb into his car and start it—as if—to actually go somewhere! My sister and I laughed. Uproariously. Pounding our knees. 

We stopped laughing when the car began to slip downhill. 

Now it spins toward us, like one of those red saucer sleds we’d nearly broken our necks on a million times, the two of us, careening and screaming down a perilous path of icy snow, the car’s shiny metal parts reflected in the moon, the ice, a metal disco, a ghastly tangle of lights—we grab onto each other’s hands. 

Three months prior – LeClaire²Home of Buffalo Bill, the American Pickers, and our abandoned ice skates., Iowa
My father’s tread was heavy down the stairs of our basement. 

My fingers clacking, the typewriter keys stilled. 

He sat on one of the bottom steps. A beat passed. “Writing a story?”

I turned from the typewriter, gave a little shrug. “Just starting a new one.” 

“That’s good.” He smiled. A small smile, but real. “I’m glad you’re keeping at it.” The previous year, I’d placed third in an Iowa allstate writing competition, and though writing was as deeply embedded in me as my skeleton, and as necessary to holding me up in the world, the small, gold trophy in my hands had fired me up with an ambition I didn’t know I could feel. 

I studied my father. I should have been used to the weary sadness on his face, but each time, the jolt, the panic to remove his burden, was fresh. I was fourteen-years-old and, in spite of my desire to alleviate his unhappiness, more often than not, I carelessly, callously added to it. 

My father said, “I’ve been praying and praying about whether we should move.” He drew a hand over his face with a long and heavy sigh.  

I recalled the father of my early childhood. The one who could whistle anything, folk tunes like When the Saints Go Marching and Wabash Cannonball drifting in through the open windows of the house, from the garden, where he hoed, shoveled, and planted, the music he made as warm and heartening as the sunlight washing the walls. When he mowed the lawn, I’d turn from my desk to see his cowboy hat wobble past the window, a piece of golden straw stuck in his mouth, his face and arms deep nut brown with tan, reminding me that he was raised a farm boy and the outdoors was his real home. He took us on camping trips, bike rides and roller skating beneath the lush Florida hammocks, hiking in the South Dakota Badlands, my first memory of my father being the carrier on his back where, before I could walk, I viewed the Black Hills, the shushing Ponderosa pines. My father’s strong, even tread was the lullaby that comforted me most, that felt like hearth and fire, heart and home.  

My father’s inclination to Old Testament gloom was probably always part of him, built in, even before he became a devout Jehovah’s Witness in his twenties.³He escaped Vietnam, yet returned from the army a changed man, with a new religion.    But it also seemed true that the apocalyptic-focused Jehovah’s Witness belief system, the rampant judgmentalism and deep attention the Watchtower Society gave to delineating what made a Good Witness vs. Bad Witness, who would make it through the fireball barrage of Armageddon, and who might not, amplified the rigid, stern, and melancholic aspects of his nature, along with the plethora of heartbreaking problems besetting our family:  

One, we had been diagnosed with Environmental Illness by the allergist at the clinic in Wisconsin who believed in our symptoms and the toxicology reports from the mobile home,⁴High formaldehyde off-gassed from the cheap particleboard and plywood, a mobile home epidemic taking a toll on countless families like ours, with little industrial regulation, and at the time, hardly any education or recourse. unlike the many doctors we’d seen who dismissed us as head cases. We were likewise diagnosed with the Epstein Barr Virus, or Chronic Fatigue. Almost every summer we piled into the RV and headed to another part of the country to visit a different specialist who had helped people with EI and might help us, too. We’d tried antigens, homeopathy, flower essences, acupuncture, and would, in the future, try many more things.⁵Brain Gym, bee venom, magnesium infusions, heavy dose Vitamin C shots, electric pulse therapy, magnet therapy, coffee enemas, etc. etc.  

Two, we were outcasts in our Jehovah’s Witness congregation, “marked” by the Elders as “bad associations”⁶1 Corinthians 15:33 “Do not be misled. Bad associations spoil useful habits”. Foundational scripture recited repetitively in Watchtower literature, and pointed weapon like at all perceived rule-breakers in the congregation. due to our irregular meeting attendance. Jehovah’s Witnesses were obligated to attend five meetings a week and consistently partake in the door-to-door preaching work in order to remain in spiritual “good standing.” This was nonnegotiable. Missing meetings or field service was akin to sinning, even if the Brother’s and Sister’s liberally applied perfumes, colognes, and hairsprays inflicted you with massive migraines and heart arrhythmias.

Three, out of all of us, my sister endured the most severe chemical sensitivities, suffering seizures, nosebleeds, brutal headaches, nausea, and vomiting that sent her home from school until, in tenth grade, she’d been forced to drop out. School administrators, much like the Jehovah’s Witness Elders and medical doctors, did not believe in Environmental Illness. They refused to send her a tutor for a “pretend” malady.  

Four, my father was juggling two lawsuits. One against the manufacturers who sold him the mobile home in full knowledge of the dangerous formaldehyde levels without disclosure. Another against the Pleasant Valley School System.⁷He won the lawsuit against the mobile home manufacturers, and lost the lawsuit against the school system, which meant that my sister was deprived of an education, since homeschooling was at that time illegal in Iowa.^. While conducting these battles, he also went toe to toe with our congregation Elders, scheduling meetings with them that lasted for hours, typing long, scripture-laden, impassioned letters to the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Brooklyn, urging them to chastise our Elders and restore our family’s spiritual reputation so we could have friends again. 

I had once tried to reveal some of the above to a journalism teacher, with whom I had felt safe to share the wealth of travails I normally kept concealed. I would never forget the way she looked at me, facial expression contorting, much like William Shatner in the Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” when confronting an airplane gremlin. “How bizarre!” she’d exclaimed, stepping backward. 

Bizarre. 

That word not only stung, but sunk in, becoming emblematic of myself and my family.⁸Like a word mascot that would follow us everywhere, minus the cheering.

Sitting at the typewriter in our basement, determinedly writing my way into other lives, and hopefully into a vastly different future, I studied my father, waiting for whatever he had come down to say. After a moments silence, he looked up and met my eyes. “I think you are wise,” he said. “What do you think we should do. Stay in Iowa, or move to Missouri?” 

My father thought me wise. The thrill reached deep, as did the responsibility. Though I paused to reflect, the answer wasn’t far from me. “In Missouri, we could start fresh. We could attend a new congregation. There’s a Jehovah’s Witness girl at the high school there. Homeschooling is legal. Misty could get her diploma, and I,” all my pent up hurt and longing shot to the surface, so my voice cracked, “I could have a friend.” 

My father nodded, and the light turned on his eyes. 

December, 1990, Strafford, Missouri

It wasn’t Stratford. That was the first realization. 

The town name that had created such a compelling narrative in my head wasn’t the actual name.⁹“Stratford” would reverse our fates and alter our fortunes because the name suggested castlelike homes, willow trees, and a glossy lake with gliding swans where serenity, prosperity, and perhaps Shakespeare abided.  

“Strafford?” As we crossed into the southwest Missouri town, population 800, my sister turned to me, her eyes asquint, accusing. 

“Oh, well, I guess he got it wrong,” cannily shifting the blame to our father. Shortly after receiving my wisdom, he had taken a trip by himself to the town, where he had a contact—a woman with severe Environmental Illness who knew of a “chemically safe” house for sale.¹⁰While fighting to raise awareness of formaldehyde in mobile homes, my father had accrued a whole network of Environmentally Ill folks nationwide, as well as health practitioners who’d had success treating patients with EI.

Strafford did not have willows or swans but rather, an extremely pointy Baptist church that looked as though it not only wanted to get close to God but dagger Him right through His celestial nuts. Strafford also flaunted two sprawling truck stops, lit up like Las Vegas at night. And, with the touch of bitter irony that every such town requires, a mobile home sales lot right before the turn off to our new address. 

Our only friends, Jan and Rick, helped us move. 

Driving the U-Haul, they followed us in our RV the 407.7 miles from LeClaire, Iowa, to Strafford, Missouri. They were also Jehovah’s Witnesses, or rather, Jan was. Such a zealous Witness, in fact, she was more like three Witnesses in one, a Trinity of Witnesses,¹¹Witnesses do not believe in the Trinity. preaching full-time, collecting Bible students, converting the whole town of Dewitt by the sheer force of her irresistible vivaciousness.¹²It was hard not to suspect that at least a few of Jan’s many Bible students were less interested in becoming Jehovah’s Witnesses than easing their deep loneliness with proximity to her big personality. Her husband, Rick, was one of the few who could resist, in her presence, cannonballing straight into the baptismal pool. While he occasionally attended meetings for Jan’s sake, and their four boys whom Jan was raising in the faith, Rick remained an Unbeliever. This fact troubled Jan’s buoyant spirit, as did association with our “marked” family. 

My sister had overheard Jan confess to our mother over coffee one afternoon, “I honestly don’t know if I should keep hanging out with you guys.”

Although her friendship with us had continued unabated, my sister’s trust dissolved. She would never feel the same way about Jan again. I could see my sister’s point of view and yet, probably at least in part because my heart was far more tied up with Jan’s, I went on adoring her. I was keenly susceptible to love, and emotionally overcome by her fondness for me—the looks and touches, the genuine desire to be in my company,¹³She picked me up and took me to Putnam Museum with her boys, treated me to Happy Joe’s Pizza and my favorite bubble gum ice cream, invited me to gather the big katydids from her grapevines for my bug barn, and once brushed my hair with such alarming tenderness I held my breath and never wanted to lose her hands from my hair! the way she read all my stories, made copies and handed them out to everyone she knew with as much diligence as she did Watchtower tracts. All these things made it so, perhaps, that I had to find a way to let her off the hook for her failings. 

And it was sublime comfort to have her there, she and Rick steady behind us, mile after mile, as my sister and I sorrowfully watched our beloved blue ribbon of Mississippi River slip away, along with our cornfields, where so much of our imagination had played out, the cornfield’s ability to become anything to lonesome and fanciful children—a gold palace, a moon, a maze, a leafy path to Disneyland. My mother, sitting beside my father in the co-pilot’s seat, came back often to check on us, and make needed contact with her best friend. “They still there? We haven’t lost them, have we? Ope, yep, there’s that red hair of hers, like a spotlight you can see from miles away!” My mother and Jan, like schoolgirls with each other, waving and waving, while my sister and I said our farewells to the Iowa state flower, the wild pink rose that would bloom and burgeon in the roadside ditches, come spring. 

The same time that we (I ardently prayed!) were blooming in Missouri.¹⁴Mis-ery, my sister ominously pronounced it, crossing the state line.

We made it to the new house as night swamped the rural road. We couldn’t see much. Only that our new driveway was a long, gravel, steeply sloping trail. Then the RV parked, and the engine shut off. 

Climbing out, our bodies remained in motion, still humming along like the road was now in our blood, our pulses like tires down asphalt. 

“I thought it was supposed to be warmer in southern Missouri,” were the first words spoken, breaking new ground. And then, “Brrr!” My mother tightened her coat, teeth beginning to chatter. 

The climate we’d left behind was bitterly cold enough in winter to freeze, rock solid, the channel of the Mississippi we lived beside. Thinking we wouldn’t have use for them in the Ozarks, we’d parted ways with our well-loved, well-worn ice-skates—breaking my sister’s heart. She thrived in the outdoors. Nothing got her going like a bruising game of ice hockey played with sticks ferreted out from the forest, empty tuna cans as pucks. 

Now, as a frigid breeze raked across our faces, my sister wailed, “I knew we should’ve brought our ice skates!^“15In the week to come, she would proclaim this with ever more fury.

Behind us, the doors of the U-Haul squeaked open, and “BRRRR!” Jan’s big voice filled the space, as it always did. “Did we make it to Missouri or get lost and wind up in the Arctic?” Her boisterous laugh, rising up, getting tangled in the frozen stars, was comforting as homemade stew, heartening us for the final trek—up the steps of the back porch, and into the new house. 

My father’s hand shook a little, inserting the key into the door. This was the house he had bought for us, in a town we had never seen. We had placed our trust in him, and here was the moment of truth. In a sense, he carried us all into that house. 

In the new kitchen, my father flicked on the fluorescent lights.

The lights trembled.

My sister coughed. 

“Alan.” My mother sniffed the air. “What is that?” 

I didn’t want to smell it. Just as I didn’t want to admit the town was called Strafford. Didn’t want to feel that the wind, now beating against the side of the house, was a mean kind of cold. But I couldn’t deny the prickly heat engulfing my face, ears burning, and the rapid heartbeat that signaled an allergic reaction.¹⁶Our immune systems were triggered by different chemicals to different degrees, with varying symptoms. Although we all suffered chemical hyperreactivity, my responses were milder than my sister, who could be felled for days with migraines, vomiting, and even seizures, depending on the chemical encountered. I was considered the healthiest in my family, since I’d lived the shortest amount of time in formaldehyde. 

When Jan and Rick stepped in, standing beside us in the kitchen, trying to shake and stomp off the shivers, my sister abruptly wheeled and ran out onto the porch, where she continued to cough and wheeze. 

“You smell that, Jan?” My mother demanded. 

Jan whipped her head from left to right, red hair in a frenzy, face sharpening, eyes squinching, as though the chemical were an intruder she could find, and subdue. 

“Did you all sleep okay?” Jan’s face brimmed with concern and sympathy at breakfast the next morning in Springfield, Queen City of the Ozarks, fifteen minutes southwest of Strafford. 

“Well, I just think we’re all a little shell-shocked,” my mother answered. She drove a sharp glance at my father who felt it, and winced, as though he’d been stabbed with a fork, like the egg on his plate. The previous night, Jan and Rick settled in for the night at the Strafford Super 8, my mother had unleashed in the RV. “Are you telling me you didn’t smell that when you came to see the house? What about your contact? You’re telling me that gal is deathly allergic to the whole wide world and she didn’t know this so-called ‘chemically safe’ house had brand new carpet?” ¹⁷Jan Stone, the Missouri Jan as we’d come to call her, suffered such a profound case of Environmental Illness, along with severe food allergies, she couldn’t leave her house and, as I’d later find out, was skeletal, subsisting primarily on milk from the goats she raised.

My father had stared into the far distance, silent, eyes glassy. 

We had all awakened with headaches, brain fog, and malaise, classic symptoms of the chemical hangover. 

Now, Rick and my father hashed out the carpet situation, my father laying out the plan that had likely kept him awake all night in the fold out bed of the RV while my mother by turns fumed and wept beside him. 

Jan, meanwhile, embarked on a sunshine spreading spree. “Sure is a nice city though! The mountains are so pretty. Just think in the spring when the dogwoods and redbuds are in bloom. You’ll always be going for rides. A lot of good shopping, too, it looks like! Right, girls?” Throwing winks at me and my sister. “I saw some big malls on the way in!” 

“Those weren’t malls, Jan,” my mother returned, darkly, taking a bite of toast. “They were churches.”¹⁸The Assemblies of God Churches is headquartered in Springfield, Missouri—for Jehovah’s Witnesses, like moving into a holy rolling hornet’s nest. 

Jan’s smile faltered. 

“Pentecostals,” my mother spat. “Pure evil!”¹⁹Pentecostals were notorious for speaking in tongues and/or attempting exorcism while we tried to warn them, on their doorstep, bright and early on a Saturday morning, of their imminent destruction in Armageddon’s fast approaching firestorm.

My sister and I watched and waited. 

This could easily be a fatal strike to Jan’s optimism. But she quickly regrouped, breaking into a grin so big, I could see the silver fillings glint and shine in the back of her teeth. “Girls!” she said, swiveling to my sister and I. “Springfield! Get it? The field here is springing up! growing ripe for harvest! Countless captives of False Religion are waiting for you to bring them The Truth!” 

We spent the rest of that day unpacking the U-Haul. 

We hauled boxes and furniture in and out with scarves wrapped up around our noses not only to avoid breathing in the frigid air but also the pernicious aroma of carpet glue. Rather than being moved inside, and settled cozily into place, our furniture was stored in the garage: beds, couches, chairs, all of it, piled up in a calamitous heap. Jan worked to keep our spirits aloft, singing, and pointing out whatever speck of good she could find to alleviate the heaviness of a steel gray sky that seemed to ever lower, pressing in like a vice. Route 66 goes right through Strafford! Isn’t that neat? You’re part of history! Can you believe those black cows outside with the white bands? I wonder what they are. We’ll call them Oreo cows! 

My father’s plan was to remove all the carpet, ventilate the carpet pad, then put it all back. 

Until then, we’d live in the RV, since to undertake this project he’d need warm weather—which shouldn’t be too far away, girls, this is the south after all! Jan chirped. 

The following morning, we followed Jan and Rick to one of Strafford’s sprawling truck stops where they fueled up the U-Haul for the trek back to Iowa. The temperature continued to nosedive. Gazing out the window from the passenger seat of the RV, mom tried to joke about Jan’s red nose, how it was the same color as her hair. But her voice broke. We were all silent. 

Before leaving, Jan and Rick climbed into the RV. The bed had been folded up, back into a table. They squeezed in beside us and we proceeded to say our goodbyes, of which I remember nothing, due to the sharp shock. 

The impact of losing my mother’s best friend was not something I had carefully factored in when imagining the move and all the consequent life changes. The only one in our Jehovah’s Witness congregation to stick close, she had attended my writing awards ceremony in Cedar Rapids, clapping her heart out when the golden trophy was placed in my hands. Likewise, she’d shown up for my sister’s emotionally grueling court testimony against the Pleasant Valley School District, the lawyer trying to make Misty “admit” she was lying about being sick. On both occasions, Jan had wept. “Jan thinks you girls hung the moon,” my mother liked to say.²⁰Jan’s choice to remain friends with us was a daring act of resistance to the Elders’ warning and the congregation’s consensus that we were “bad association”. This was a precarious position to put herself in. The Jehovah’s Witness faith was her life, and she stood to lose everything, her identity, purpose, and community, if her own spiritual standing came into question and she found herself, like us, ostracized. In the face of that, to choose us was love.   

Jan hugged me, long and tight, and I nestled into her, breathing in her skin, her hair, the pure scent of her, since she refrained from using chemicals around our family. “I’ll be praying the Sister at your new high school turns out to be a kindred spirit,” she whispered in my ear. And then, “Keep writing your beautiful stories,” letting her dear, freckled hand drift down my face, a motherly caress.  

To watch her then, climb into the U-Haul. To watch the U-Haul head for the main road. To watch the U-Haul drive away—without us— 

I was the first to break. 

Then my mother. 

Then my sister. 

My father sat, blinking, surrounded by the keens and wails of his wife and daughters, abandoned at the TA Truck Stop in Strafford, Missouri.  

Life in the RV was not too arduous at first. Years of camping trips that combined recreation with our quest for health and healing, along with living in relative isolation in rural places, had trained us for tight living quarters, minimal resources, and the ability to entertain ourselves with preternatural resilience.²¹My sister and I were stuck in a social no woman’s land. Warned not to make friends with “Worldly” associates at school, while our fellow Witness youth were warned away from us—we had no choice but to lean into solitude, even more than the average Gen X kid. At age thirteen, I still maintained a troupe of reliable imaginary friends.  Misty and I played Spank the Berry Bird until our palms were too inflamed to continue spanking. We then turned our attention to urgently competitive rounds of Scrabble that ended with the board flipped and Scrabble tiles in my sister’s bra. Every night, our father drove us into Springfield for dinner at Shoney’s Buffet. My father requested a booth in the far back, away from everyone, reducing the chance of assault from chemical laden toiletries, although our fellow buffet goers weren’t gussied up but, like us, assembled around the steaming buffet, bewildered and bedraggled, decked out in hoodies and sweatpants, as though they, too might be living in their RV. Misty and I sat coloring the iconic Shoney’s Bear menus, elbow to elbow in the red vinyl booths, at our advanced ages of fourteen and twenty-one,²²At twenty-one, my sister lived with us like a teenager. She was haunted by the fear she would never get well and have her own life. She memorized, and often recited, Emily Dickinson’s poems about the claustrophobia of time, and the horror of illness and death. while my father and I bonded over Shoney’s clam chowder. 

I had never had clams before. My mother was squeamish about seafood and rarely prepared it. My sister shared this repulsion. My father, true to his signature role in the family, was the odd man out. When he returned from the buffet with a steaming bowl of clam chowder, on cue, the recoiling and ew-ing began. My father smiled, but watching him eat his clam chowder alone got to me. My father was lonely in a layered way. Lonely as a human, as a man in a family of women, and then the most piercing—the loneliness of one who believes that they fail in everything they try, no matter how well intentioned. After all, what could be more beautiful, more moral, more noble than working with all your heart to buy your family a home?²³My father had his own carpet cleaning business. Called “New Life Carpets,” the name was more than a business promise, it contained a deep, poignant hope for himself and his family. And it was all that, no matter the outcome. 

What I would recall most vividly thirty years later would not be the odor of carpet glue, but rather: two stacks of emptied clam chowder bowls, my father’s and mine, side by side at the Springfield, Missouri, Shoney’s Buffet. 

On December 15^th, it was thirty degrees. 

On December 21^st it was seven degrees.

On December 22^nd it was three degrees. 

On December 23^rd it was zero degrees. 

And then—the ice-storm hit.²⁴At the time an unprecedented weather event in the Springfield area, undoubtedly because we were there, living in our RV.

The neighbor’s car spins toward us and my sister and I, sitting up from under a heap of blankets on the foldout bed in the back of the RV, grab hands and pray the resurrection is true, and that we’re still in line for it, still in Jehovah’s favor, that—as promised by the Watchtower Society—we’d only feel like we were dead for a blink of the eye then alive again, back on earth, only an earth restored to Paradise, trees thick with fruit in the rich jewel tones of Watchtower illustrations— 

Inches from the RV, the car slides to a stop. 

Our neighbor sits inside, white-knuckling the wheel, breathing hard. 

In tandem, my sister and I fall backward on the pillows. 

My sister shakes her fist in the air and screams. 

“I told you we should have brought our ice skates!” 

School was canceled and Winter Break extended. 

I met my new Jehovah’s Witness friend, Lori, over the phone. 

I sat in the kitchen, the only room in the new house without new carpet, and flung open the doors and windows. Hunkered on the floor in a winter coat, trying to bite back my chattering teeth, I told her that the move had gone great and yes! We loved our new house. 

“I can’t wait to see it!” she exclaimed. 

I nearly fainted. A whole montage played in my head, sleepovers and slumber parties, mall trips and bonding, the unparalleled beauty of what had, for so long, felt like the impossible: having a friend. 

“Me neither,” I said, and there, shivering on the floor, nearly wept. 

At Strafford High School, a squat brick building with portable classrooms out back, Lori and I compared schedules and discovered, with glee, we had nearly every class together. 

Then we discovered something a tad more complex. 

I sat for the Pledge of Allegiance. She stood. 

I stayed mute for the patriotic songs. She belted them out. 

I refused the birthday cake. She indulged, licking her lips. 

Classmates looked suspiciously between us, trying to solve the riddle. 

Aren’t you both Jehovah’s Witnesses? 

Lori chastised me for being rigid. She claimed it wasn’t necessary to strictly follow every rule,²⁵Hard to swallow for a kid whose family has been shunned for chronic illness. while jumping into her “secret” boyfriend’s red sports car at lunch, zooming away from school grounds. 

She was an Elder’s daughter.²⁶She could get away with shit.

“And to think,” my mother cried, “we came to this godforsaken place so you could have a friend!” 

Spring lurched in, transforming the rolling hills behind our new house into green idylls where the legendary Oreo cows grazed. Daffodils exploded through the once ice-covered ground. The Cottonwood tree outside my bedroom window leafed out, making a delightful clapping sound in the breeze. Redwing blackbirds perched on fence posts and trilled opera midst the gently waving cattails. 

And the roof of our new house was blue as the sky— 

with carpet pad. 

My father and I drove side by side to our first meeting at Kingdom Hall in Republic, Missouri, about an hour’s drive each way. Rather than dutifully attending the Kingdom Hall in our assigned territory,²⁷The Watchtower thinks of Kingdom Halls as present day “arks.” Every Witness family is assigned a congregation that’s easy for them to flee to when Armageddon arrives.  my father had chosen Republic due to its reputation for believing in and caring for the needs of Environmentally Ill folks. My sister and mother stayed behind, distrusting, fearful. “I’ll let you go check it out first,” my mother whispered to me. “Let’s see what happens.” 

So it was my father and I, setting off together—the pioneers. 

He wore his navy blue suit that my mother had carefully pressed but that no longer fit quite right, and I wore my long floral print dress with puffed sleeves and prim lace sailor collar²⁸Jehovah’s Witness fashion 2.0. that had only seen the inside of a closet for years.  

While we drove, I kept glancing at my father. He had aged in just the few months since our move, more frown lines around his mouth, carved in more deeply, his Abe Lincoln-esque sideburns turning gray. 

My father had torn out all the carpet and pad in the new house, prying out carpet tacks, veins popping, rivers of sweat, putting it all back again—by himself. 

And my mother, sister, and I were mortified by the public spectacle of bright blue carpet pad ventilating on our roof—the way our neighbors pointed and stared. 

Poor dad. 

After everything, all the disappointments, I wondered if he regretted that pivotal moment in the basement, supplicating his fourteen-year-old, thinking her wise—ah, grave mistake! 

If so, I couldn’t see regret that day in the car. He whistled as he drove, a Kingdom melody about hope in a New Earth. He turned to me with tears in his eyes, set his hand on my knee. “Chumps,” using his childhood nickname for me, “I am so happy to have you here by my side.”

 In the years to come, our family would endure plentiful sorrows²⁹My father, sister, and I would each, in succession, nearly succumb to a life-threatening illness, while my mother’s mental health steadily eroded, resulting in the incurable fracture of the family. and I would return to these words again and again, my father’s joy in me, as the sought after treasure of my life. 

When we arrived, we simply sat in the quiet for a minute, watching in shared wonder the Brothers and Sisters, their children, piling out of sedate cars and minivans. Finally my father turned to me. “Well, kid. Are you ready?” 

I couldn’t say I was ever ready, but life is propulsive. 

Entering the Kingdom Hall, we paused, opening the door wide for two Brothers hauling out cords and equipment to a station wagon parked out front. My father asked what they were doing. 

“Brother Farris has bad allergies. We set up audio in his car so he can listen to the meetings.” 

My father and I exchanged glances, eyebrows raised. 

As we moved down the aisle, we spied a Sister wearing a surgical mask. 

Again, we traded looks. 

We took our seats up front, and my father bent to unzip his new bookbag, collecting his Bible, his Watchtower, a notebook, a pencil, and—one more essential item, as others were seated around us, and the perfumes and colognes intensified. 

An Elder jogged up on stage. He straightened his tie, raised the microphone. As he launched into the Sunday talk, his eyes moved across the congregation. 

Three, two, one, and…

The Elder’s gaze found my father.³⁰At meetings, my father wore an industrial strength, heavy duty, army green dual respirator gas mask that looked like he was going to sandblast, paint, then go to war.

He jumped, grabbed the podium, and stared. 

I patted the crook of my father’s arm, where his suit coat rumpled. 

If you could read the word in neon lights flashing through that Elder’s mind— 

We knew what it would be. 

And so, by now, do you. 

• 1
  Not Stratford. ↩︎
• 2
  Home of Buffalo Bill, the American Pickers, and our abandoned ice skates. ↩︎
• 3
  He escaped Vietnam, yet returned from the army a changed man, with a new religion.    ↩︎
• 4
  High formaldehyde off-gassed from the cheap particleboard and plywood, a mobile home epidemic taking a toll on countless families like ours, with little industrial regulation, and at the time, hardly any education or recourse. ↩︎
• 5
  Brain Gym, bee venom, magnesium infusions, heavy dose Vitamin C shots, electric pulse therapy, magnet therapy, coffee enemas, etc. etc.  ↩︎
• 6
  1 Corinthians 15:33 “Do not be misled. Bad associations spoil useful habits”. Foundational scripture recited repetitively in Watchtower literature, and pointed weapon like at all perceived rule-breakers in the congregation. ↩︎
• 7
  He won the lawsuit against the mobile home manufacturers, and lost the lawsuit against the school system, which meant that my sister was deprived of an education, since homeschooling was at that time illegal in Iowa.^. ↩︎
• 8
  Like a word mascot that would follow us everywhere, minus the cheering. ↩︎
• 9
  “Stratford” would reverse our fates and alter our fortunes because the name suggested castlelike homes, willow trees, and a glossy lake with gliding swans where serenity, prosperity, and perhaps Shakespeare abided. ↩︎
• 10
  While fighting to raise awareness of formaldehyde in mobile homes, my father had accrued a whole network of Environmentally Ill folks nationwide, as well as health practitioners who’d had success treating patients with EI. ↩︎
• 11
  Witnesses do not believe in the Trinity. ↩︎
• 12
  It was hard not to suspect that at least a few of Jan’s many Bible students were less interested in becoming Jehovah’s Witnesses than easing their deep loneliness with proximity to her big personality. ↩︎
• 13
  She picked me up and took me to Putnam Museum with her boys, treated me to Happy Joe’s Pizza and my favorite bubble gum ice cream, invited me to gather the big katydids from her grapevines for my bug barn, and once brushed my hair with such alarming tenderness I held my breath and never wanted to lose her hands from my hair! ↩︎
• 14
  Mis-ery, my sister ominously pronounced it, crossing the state line. ↩︎
• 15
  In the week to come, she would proclaim this with ever more fury. ↩︎
• 16
  Our immune systems were triggered by different chemicals to different degrees, with varying symptoms. Although we all suffered chemical hyperreactivity, my responses were milder than my sister, who could be felled for days with migraines, vomiting, and even seizures, depending on the chemical encountered. I was considered the healthiest in my family, since I’d lived the shortest amount of time in formaldehyde. ↩︎
• 17
  Jan Stone, the Missouri Jan as we’d come to call her, suffered such a profound case of Environmental Illness, along with severe food allergies, she couldn’t leave her house and, as I’d later find out, was skeletal, subsisting primarily on milk from the goats she raised. ↩︎
• 18
  The Assemblies of God Churches is headquartered in Springfield, Missouri—for Jehovah’s Witnesses, like moving into a holy rolling hornet’s nest.  ↩︎
• 19
  Pentecostals were notorious for speaking in tongues and/or attempting exorcism while we tried to warn them, on their doorstep, bright and early on a Saturday morning, of their imminent destruction in Armageddon’s fast approaching firestorm. ↩︎
• 20
  Jan’s choice to remain friends with us was a daring act of resistance to the Elders’ warning and the congregation’s consensus that we were “bad association”. This was a precarious position to put herself in. The Jehovah’s Witness faith was her life, and she stood to lose everything, her identity, purpose, and community, if her own spiritual standing came into question and she found herself, like us, ostracized. In the face of that, to choose us was love.   ↩︎
• 21
  My sister and I were stuck in a social no woman’s land. Warned not to make friends with “Worldly” associates at school, while our fellow Witness youth were warned away from us—we had no choice but to lean into solitude, even more than the average Gen X kid. At age thirteen, I still maintained a troupe of reliable imaginary friends.  ↩︎
• 22
  At twenty-one, my sister lived with us like a teenager. She was haunted by the fear she would never get well and have her own life. She memorized, and often recited, Emily Dickinson’s poems about the claustrophobia of time, and the horror of illness and death. ↩︎
• 23
  My father had his own carpet cleaning business. Called “New Life Carpets,” the name was more than a business promise, it contained a deep, poignant hope for himself and his family. ↩︎
• 24
  At the time an unprecedented weather event in the Springfield area, undoubtedly because we were there, living in our RV. ↩︎
• 25
  Hard to swallow for a kid whose family has been shunned for chronic illness. ↩︎
• 26
  She could get away with shit. ↩︎
• 27
  The Watchtower thinks of Kingdom Halls as present day “arks.” Every Witness family is assigned a congregation that’s easy for them to flee to when Armageddon arrives.  ↩︎
• 28
  Jehovah’s Witness fashion 2.0. ↩︎
• 29
  My father, sister, and I would each, in succession, nearly succumb to a life-threatening illness, while my mother’s mental health steadily eroded, resulting in the incurable fracture of the family. ↩︎
• 30
  At meetings, my father wore an industrial strength, heavy duty, army green dual respirator gas mask that looked like he was going to sandblast, paint, then go to war. ↩︎