Lots of times, Mommy and I went to the Maryland Academy of Sciences on Thursday night to see movies about paper making and fish and all kinds of interesting things. We looked through a telescope at the moon and the planets and the Milky Way. I learned there that the Egyptians made the first sundial. So, when I saw the house, I liked it for so many reasons.

Mommy remembered, and then she thought, "It is 1:35, the moment when Linda died, and this is the first time since her death I've come back here!"

We didn't get the house because Daddy wasn't able to make the arrangements about it with the Veterans' Administration. They didn't approve of it because it was near a railroad, the old Ma and Pa, Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad.

My school was a big school with high school children too. We had such good times there-Valerie Ash and Gary and Ronny and Joan Cromwell and Albert and Stevie Albridge and all the other kids. I loved it there and my teachers and principal too. Mommy decided to put a memorial there for me. With the money I saved, $55.00, she bought a beautiful painting of a little girl in a red dress holding a white kitten, called "Chums," by Jane Freeman. Jane Freeman was born in England in 1883. She studied painting in Paris and later lived in New York.

My name was put on a gold plaque, and it said I gave the picture. Mommy decided that the children in my class would like the little girl with the kitten, and she was right.

The day she and Daddy gave it to the school, the children sat in a circle, and they asked all kinds of questions about the picture. There were big hollyhocks and the sun setting and lots of color and things to find. They wanted to know why she held the kitten by the front legs and let it hang down. Mommy said, "That's how lots of little girls carry kittens!"

She knew one who carried a kitten like that-me! Just before I got sick, I was given a gray kitten by a lady on a farm in Fork, Maryland, who had nursery plants. It was Stony Batter Nursery. I called the kitten Lucifer, after a cat in a story. I always carried Lucifer by his top front legs with my arms around his chest, and he hung down.

Mommy and I saw some little holly plants at the nursery. She brought two to plant on Providence Road, but they didn't live, so when she went to Seattle and saw the tremendous green and white holly trees with red berries, she feasted her eyes on them. They were beautiful! After the trip to California and Seattle, I know Mommy felt better because she didn't always wake up with tears in the morning, missing me when she awakes, gasping for her breath.

Mommy prayed a lot. A long time ago, when I told her about God, the first story she told me about the Bible was Noah's Ark. When Granddaddy Franklin gave me the blue ark with the ladder and all the animals and Noah and his family and the dove, I knew he liked to pray too.

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