Our shoes were weighted down with magnets and she made us fill our pockets with pebbles from the driveway. She finally let us out to play in the backyard with a sturdy rope tied around our waist that led back to the house. There was a rope out front as well, for getting the paper and the mail.

"Thank God we have an inside door to the garage," she said. Though my father, hardheaded and a firm believer only in what he saw with his own two eyes would boldly walk out the front door and wouldn't use the rope. I wondered every morning that summer if I would come downstairs and find the car there and my father gone.