Then Laura went on to the end of the paragraph, and suddenly she too was sprinkled with water. She looked all around her, and she couldn't believe it-she couldn't understand it.

In this particular church, the holy water was kept in the vestibule rather than inside. It was a very old church.

Laura hadn't paid any attention when Mommy felt the water. But she herself felt it on the back of her right hand and wrist. It was a light sprinkle of water. She jumped and said to my mother, "Eleanor, did you feel water just then?" My Mommy said, "Yes, I did, on my forehead and on my wrist." Laura said, "Oh well, that's nothing!"

Then Laura was sprinkled again on her right hand and wrist. Then she believed something very mystical had happened. She said to Mommy, "We were both sprinkled very much like when the priest takes the silver thing and blesses with holy water. I thought at first, Eleanor, you had doused yourself with holy water."

Well, since this was one of Mommy's first real visits to churches, she didn't know anything at all about what happens in churches. So she listened.

Next, Mommy decided to borrow the money to take the trip. After this, she decided that she had to be baptized before she went. She couldn't take any chances on not joining me, if she left everybody too.

So all these things she decided to do because of Laura's giving the $5.00 gift for me to the church.

At the same time, Mommy began to want to give as much as she could to churches because they all work for God and help people. She started out with a gift from me.

When we moved to the house in Towson, I helped carry all the magazines and newspapers into the basement. We stacked them all together.

She and Daddy heard a choir concert at the Faith Presbyterian Church one night, just by chance. In their program, the church asked for papers to sell to help build a new church on Loch Raven Boulevard. The Reverend Mr. Jackson was the minister. The new church was near Woodbourne Avenue.

She called them the next day. They came to get the papers. Whenever she rode past the new church later, she thought, "My papers must have bought a brick or two."

Mommy thought we should help all the churches, for the money given to a church becomes holy and blessed. Churches are a sanctuary to worship and love God. They should all be our best happy places, and invite everybody to come in and pray with love, forgetting everything except our Father who art in heaven, and be thinking always about God first.

Mommy was very glad the church helped her decide to go to California. She found real happiness again for a little while in music and in song and in so many beautiful thoughts and so many wonderful people. But she never stopped thinking about the vision. She wanted to write all about it, just as she had wanted to paint the picture of the vision.

When she left California, she took the Northwest Passage back home. She went to see Aunt Celeste and her children and Uncle Morton.

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