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times when she liked to talk to Paul alone, as if he were the only adult she could confide in.
    And the right time for questioning my mother about love—and how it could make you so unhappy—didn’t come.
    For one thing she was studying house plans. Mr. Percy had given her the latest issues of several magazines that featured house plans. Each evening, as soon as supper was cleared away, she and Paul and Tom went over the magazines, trying to decide on the house they wanted.
    My mother wanted three bedrooms. Paul insisted that there be electricity. Tom wanted to have an upstairs.
    At last they decided on a three-bedroom bungalow, wired for electricity and provision made for developing the attic and a bathroom at some time in the future.
    The coupon for ordering the blueprints was clipped,and along with a money order for twenty-five dollars, bought from Mr. Percy at the post office, it was sent to the magazine. Within two weeks the blueprints arrived, and I was elated when Paul pointed out a bedroom for me at the back of the house.
    One day all of us walked over to the land to choose the best site for the new house. The late June sunlight made the woods a pattern of shifting shadows, and great yellow shafts of light beamed from the treetops to the forest floor. Near the creek we found a level area thick and heavy with meadow grass. The grassy clearing was ringed with dark glossy cedars, and through them we saw blue glimpses of the sea. Like soft music in the background, creek water ran over mountain rocks.
    â€œIt’s perfect,” my mother said.
    After the bulldozer cleared a way from the main road to the building site, lumber began to arrive by the truckload. There were cedar posts, beams, joists, two-by-fours, windows and bundles of cedar shingles held together with wire. None of the lumber was finished. It all had to be planed by hand.
    Paul and Tom were up and ready to work as soon as it was light in the morning. When I saw the progress made on the house each day, I could hardly believe that my brothers had done it themselves.
    My mother and I did a lot of extra baking. The boys were always hungry. And we always had kettles of hot water ready for them to wash off the day’s dirt when they came in at dusk.
    My younger brothers, Jim and Mike, took care of the water and wood supply for the household. My mother, besides taking care of the cow and chickens, had started to dig a shallow trench for the water pipes to the house. Sometimes at night her arms were so stiff that she couldn’t take out the hairpins that kept her black hair in a neat roll at the back, and she called me to help. She sat, hands relaxed in her lap, a smile softening her face as she told me how Pep, our dog, had worked right along with her, his paws digging beside her shovel.
    The new house never seemed to belong to me in the same way it belonged to my mother and brothers. Maybe it was because I was away eight or nine hours a day, working at a summer job.
    It was Mr. Percy, really, who had got me the job. Jobs weren’t all that plentiful for someone my age. When the Lawsons from Vancouver had inquired at the store for a girl to help out for the summer, Mr. Percy had recommended me.
    The Lawsons had a cottage right on the beach near the diving float. It was one of the newer, more modern ones made of wood and glass, the sundeck gay with red-and-white chaise lounges and flower boxes of white-and-red petunias.
    Mrs. Lawson was in her early forties, her blonde hair done in broad waves standing out from her head. She was only a few years younger than my mother, but they were very different. Although Mrs. Lawson always seemed to besmiling, her smile didn’t make it to her eyes. They were dark blue, with a black outer ring around the iris, and there was no expression in them. Not like my mother’s eyes. When she smiled, her eyes were candle flames, and when she was unhappy, their depths were sad songs. Other times they could