look into their own dark places

As long as I can remember, I've heard the natural voice of every living thing around me. The natural world speaks to me. Not the way you might think though. Not with words, but with messages, like in dreams where everything is all jumbled together and makes perfect sense until you wake up, and then it's up to you to find the deeper meaning in it. The only way I've been able to explain it to the three people I've ever told is the way the apple tree outside my window communicates with the natural world. Leaves rustle, branches sway and voices deep and warm lilt on the breeze, embracing me in their songs and I know somehow that the tree is saying goodbye to the season, or thanking the rain for a good drenching, or warning the owl sheltering in its branches that a hawk is circling overhead.

In the spring I can hear the gasps and moans of newly plowed fields when farmers split the earth's back wide open in rows. When the sun drops into the lake, shooting pink and gold rays across the briny surface, I hear the field lullaby it's new crop to sleep, and through the early morning tumult of birdsong, all the hopeful little sprouts singing hymns of adoration as they eagerly push up and out of the soil to warm themselves in the sun's love. The house talks to me too, though I wish it wouldn't. Most folks think a house can't talk, that it's not alive because they can't see it take a breath, but it takes a breath all right. It sure does. Sometimes I think if I just ignore it, it will leave me alone, quit telling me what it knows. But it won't. It knows I hear it and it has stories it's eager to tell, just like how the mighty weight of a secret can pester a soul into spilling all.

The sun shines like a golden halo against the turquoise sky during the spring and summer months, and well into fall. The Utah sky is colored a blue so harsh and unforgiving, it pierces straight to the heart, so that sometimes, just looking at it makes me want to cry. I don't know for what, but I just want to. Rain or shine, I tend the runt lambs, mixing up powdered milk and water in an old Coca Cola bottle with a rubber nipple on the end, while my lambs bleat frantically, butting my legs with their moist black noses. The minute I walk out the kitchen's side door, my lambs are calling for me, and they come running across the pasture, jumping in excited little arcs like you'd imagine they do when Little Bo Peep is herding them back home. They try to get to me through the plank fence and sometimes I have to lean over it and shove a bottle in their mouths until I can climb over the fence and feed them properly. Sometimes they get so excited when they're eating, they knock the bottles out of my hands and I have to mix up more milk for them before I go to school.

Mama says my lambs start bleating for me once they hear the old school bus rumbling across the train tracks coming down Gentile Street. Mr.Stevenson, the bus driver, swats me on the arm and winks when I get off the bus and says, Lizbeth, your babies are calling you. Some of the boys imitate him, calling out, Lizz-Beth, your babies, oh, your babies are calling you. I just ignore them, but I always have to mash them the next day at school, usually by a contest of skill. I hit them on the legs and back with the dodge ball hard enough to knock them over, or send the tether ball sailing so...