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the nether regions before many months had passed.
    ‘Wherever there’s disharmony or out-and-out fighting in the household you can bet your bottom dollar Phillip’s at the center of it. He’s also the cause of it and the reason it keeps going,’ Old Jerry had told Sally’s mother, Brenda, when she informed him of the pregnancy. ‘He’s always tried to wave a big stick, so to speak, at his younger brothers and to bully his sisters. He’s forever been intimidating towards the other kids, hot-tempered and unpredictable. Can be as meek as a lamb but it doesn’t last more the a few hours at a stretch. Good luck to the girl if she can live with him for the rest of her life is all I can say, Brenda. It’s a tall order, that one.’
    The upshot of all this was that the young couple, Sally and Phillip, were married in haste with a lovely wedding that took all of Sally’s mother’s meager savings. Without a dime to their names, they had to come to live in the von Hildebrand compound until they could scratch together a roof over their own heads.
    This was no mean task seeing as Sally had been forced to give up her job in the town of Oak Tree Creek, some twenty miles away over rough, unsealed roads, besides the fact that the young couple had no vehicle. Phillip was getting only subsistence wages and his keep while helping Old Jerry keep the farm in some kind of productivity. Working the less than arable fields of the share farm fell in the main to young Phillip who had been working for peanuts for the past years. How could they save to get into a house?
    Fortunately, one of Phillip’s maternal uncles, Jim Gessop, who lived on the Perishing Plains North Road, had a tiny house on his farm. After a few months he offered it to Phillip and Sally, rent free, until they could get on their feet. The minuscule house stood out on the wide prairie, exposed to westerly winds and searing summer heat, isolated except for the home of Jim and his family. 
    Miles from the gate, the house stood with a few scrawny pines as a windbreak to ward off the Westerlies that blew ferociously over the plains in the winter. Sally hated the place and longed to be somewhere where she could see other human beings moving around. Depressed by the isolation, she yearned to be able simply to see cars driving by, people walking, signs of life that someone else was alive in the world besides herself and Phillip and the scrawny pine trees.
    The young couple lived there for a few years, had a few babies and moved on. But this is not their story, we know. It’s Tootsie’s and her parents’.
    If and when Sally’s mother, Brenda and Tootsie had cause to meet, the latter continued to look down her nose at ‘ Miss ’ Peterson, even though Brenda tried to be friendly and asked to be called by her first name. Tootsie was much too proud to do that, although she was beginning to realize that the world was imperfect and no matter how hard she tried to alter the behavior of those within her orbit, and imperfect was what the world would possibly always be.
    However, in her unceasing efforts to make it perfect by readily showing her disapproval , she was not only unfriendly, she encouraged all her family to be unfriendly to Sally, her aunts, uncles and cousins as well as her mother. Tootsie’s sense of superiority remained supreme. Nor was she a woman to be trifled with lightly.
    Within a short time of the young couple marrying, Phillip’s father, Old Jerry, suddenly married his paramour, Emma. She soon gave birth to a large, full term son seven months after they were married, an obvious slip which produced a very large and healthy ‘premature’ baby, Basil.
    Old Jerry was in his sixties and Emma well into her forties when they tied the knot and began child-rearing anew with the birth of Basil the Bonnie. If his sarcastic remark to Sally’s friend about the needlessness of a honeymoon for Sally and Phillip ever reared its ugly head to haunt his insensitive mind he