2002-03-27 - 9:57 a.m.

KLICKITAT

Isn't that a wonderful word? It probably means 'green toad' or 'lump of dirt' in an Indian language, but I love the sound of it. Haven't thought of the Klickitat Rivers (Big and Little) for years and years.

It is one of my earliest memories. I don't recall anything of the actual camping trip or trips. I think some of Mamma's pictures were of us there, but I don't remember specifically. J may have been a baby when we went there, don't remember that, either. What I remember is the feeling of being a real family once. Going on a camping trip with healthy parents.

By the time I was old enough to remember things, Daddy was a full-fledged alcoholic, spending or giving away almost all his wages in a local bar on payday, and Mamma was slowly sinking down into mental illness. Talking to the army who had 'bugged' our trailer house, brooding over the $150,000 she had been swindled out of as a baby by the people she had thought of as her mom and dad.

I don't know where that idea originated from. Her nose and Granpa's were just alike, and she and her sisters all resembled each other. Just delusions, I guess, but they made a nightmare of most of my adolescent years. The worse she got, the worse he got. An endless circle that spiraled down and down.

At various times as an adult, when I was overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of life, and I felt as if I were on the brink of that same spiral, I would recall the verse in II Timothy 1:7, "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind."

And I would stand firmly, even on that brink, until I could see the next safe step.

EE's devotional

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