relatives could move into it,' he told me. 'The owner of the books had died. He was considered the family eccentric, and no one else in the household shared his enthusiasm for reading big, bulky books made of paper. I didn't think you'd mind my buying them for the school.'
'Mind?' I said. 'Of course not!'
'Lucio said he wasn't sure we should spend the money, but Zahra said you were crazy for more books. I figured she'd know.'
I grinned. 'She knows. I thought everyone knew.'
There were fifteen boxes of books. We took them into the school, and today we recovered as best we could from the stuff on the Worldisk by looking through the books and shelving them. We read bits of this and that to one another. People got excited and interested, and everyone carried away a book or two to read. After hearing the news, we all needed to read something that wasn't depressing.
I wound up with a couple of books on drawing. I haven't tried to draw anything since I was seven or eight. Now, all of a sudden, I find myself interested in learning to draw, learning to draw well—if I can. I want to learn something new and unrelated to any of our troubles.
SUNDAY, november 14, 2032
I'm pregnant!
No surrogates, no computerized eggs, no drugs. Bankole and I did it the good old-fashioned way—at last!
It's crazy that it should happen now, just when America has elected a wild man to lead it. Bankole and I began trying as soon as we could see that we were going to survive here at Acorn. Bankole's first wife couldn't have children. As a young woman back in the 1990s, she was in a serious car accident and wound up with a hysterectomy, among other things. Bankole claimed he never minded. He said the world was going to hell just as fast as it could, and it would be an act of cruelty to bring a child into it. They talked about adopting, but never did.
Now he's going to be a father, and in spite of all his talk, he's almost jumping up and down—that is, whenever he isn't being scared to death. He's talking about moving into an established town again. He hadn't said anything about that since right after we got the truck, but now the subject is back, and he's serious. He wants to protect me. I realize that. I suppose I should be glad he feels that way, but I wish he would show his protective feelings in another way.
'You're a kid yourself,' he said to me. 'You don't have the sense to be afraid.'
I can't seem to get angry with him for saying things like that. He says them, then he thinks for a moment, and if he doesn't watch himself, he begins to grin like a boy. Then he remembers his fears and looks panicked. Poor man.
Chapter 6
? ? ?
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
God is Change
And hidden within Change
Is surprise, delight,
Confusion, pain.
Discovery, loss,
Opportunity, and growth.
As always, God exists
To shape
And to be shaped.
IT'S A GOOD THING, I suppose, that my mother's God was Change. Her life had a way of changing in abrupt, important ways. I don't suppose she was really any more prepared for sudden changes than anyone else, but her beliefs helped her cope with them, even take advantage of them when they came.
I enjoyed reading about the way she and my father reacted to my conception. Such mismatched people, yet such a normal reaction. She couldn't know that she was in for other major changes even before she could get used to being pregnant
from
