Read Online Spoken from the Heart by Laura Bush - Free Book Online Page B

wallow and filled up, lakelike, when it rained. Then, at dusk, the low places would teem with frogs that had congregated in the damp. We heard their rhythmic croaking as we fell asleep. They were usually gone by dawn when the sun rose to bake the ground back to dryness. And every night, the cool air carried the piercing call of train whistles as miles of freight cars rolled past Midland on the rails.

    I was a homebody even as a child. My mother enrolled me in ballet, piano, and Brownies, but I was happiest at school or at home. The absence of brothers and sisters had another side: it cemented the deep bonds between my parents and myself. We were a tightly knit unit of three. My parents took me out to dinner, took me driving. Our lives intertwined, and I wanted to be with them. I felt my greatest sense of contentment lying on the couch in our den. I had no desire to stray too far from home or from Mother and Daddy.
    The summer when I was eight, Mother was pregnant with the baby who would have been my sister. The baby was not due until September, but on July 15, Mother went into labor. Daddy drove her to Midland Memorial, and I was sent to stay with Alyne Gray and her daughter, Jane. It was Alyne who told me that my sister had died, that no baby would be coming home.
    Instead, I was the one who was going away. For months, Mother and Daddy had planned to send me to Camp Mitre Peak, a Girl Scout camp outside Alpine, Texas, where there were mountains, including the sixteen-hundred-foot-tall Mitre Peak, which looked like a giant arrowhead covered with green, scrubby brush. I left only a week or two after Mother lost my sister.
    I was so homesick the feeling was almost crushing. Stuck in a completely unfamiliar place, I missed my parents dreadfully. Camp was nothing like being in El Paso; at night, there was no Grammee to hold my hand. I sent one letter home. I sat on my bunk and with my schoolgirl penmanship wrote to Mother and Daddy reminding them to pick me up on Saturday. When I addressed the envelope, I wrote "Estes Avenue," but forgot "Midland, Texas." The letter came back on Friday afternoon. The counselors gave it to me during mail call, and I sat holding it in my shaking hands. I was convinced that if my parents didn't get that letter, they wouldn't remember to pick me up the next morning. I envisioned spending days, perhaps another week, alone in my bunk under the shadow of the mountain. Sick with worry, I threw up, and the counselors put me to bed. The next morning, Mother and Daddy showed up exactly on time, and for years they would tell the story about how I started off running toward Daddy's side of the car and then stopped and hurriedly turned toward Mother's door, wanting so desperately to hug them both at once.
    I went to Camp Mitre Peak again after seventh grade and adored it. But at age eight, I preferred home.
    When I came through the door in the afternoon, I was greeted by the soft rustle of book pages and my mother, her feet propped up, book open on her lap. My mother loved to read. Her canon ranged from the traditional to the eclectic, writers like John Marquand and Somerset Maugham. She loved Willa Cather, especially Death Comes for the Archbishop . She read eagerly about the Southwest; it didn't matter whether the story was set in far West Texas or New Mexico or Arizona. She read books about anthropology, native peoples, and early explorers. She delved into naturalists, like Loren Eiseley. And she read to me, her voice weaving its spells of character, plot, and place, until I too yearned to decipher the fine black letters printed on the page. Once I did, I read with my friends, swapping well-thumbed copies of Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, and Nancy Drew with Georgia Todd, who owned the complete collection. We loved Nancy not for her independence or her car--we expected to have the same when we reached eighteen--but for the twists and turns of the mystery plots and the depictions of friendship. And, like me,