Free The Color of Your Skin Ain’t the Color of Your Heart by Michael Phillips Page B

everything.
    All the remaining crops were gone. The fields didn’t even look like fields anymore, just brown mud everywhere.
    Within two weeks the river and stream were almost back to normal.
    And gradually life got back to normal for us too, although I don’t know what normal actually meant. Was anything about Katie’s and my life normal? Or would it ever be?
    As close as the water had come, Rosewood wasn’t too much the worse for the flood, except for one of the old slave cabins, that is. When the water went down and the surrounding area started to dry up, and Katie and I went on our first walk about, we discovered that the cabin closest to the river wasn’t even there. The flood had taken it, and it was just gone!
    Other than that we saw no damage.
    The barn dried out, then the pasture, and pretty soon we were able to let the horses and cows back outside. Even the cows frolicked a little at first, and the horses ran and ran from fence to fence the whole length of the pasture. It was some time, however, before we could take the cows out to any of their usual fields, since they were covered in mud. It took several weeks both for the mud to dry up and the grass to start growing back up through it again. But eventually the green returned to the fields and woods and landscape.
    There was one place that didn’t return to green—the enclosed area around the pig shed. It remained a muddy, stinky, brown mess all through the winter!

L OOKING A HEAD
    12

    O NE AFTERNOON K ATIE LEFT THE HOUSE AND said she wanted to go to her secret place in the woods to see how much damage the flood had caused to it.
    I was curious myself, but I knew that if Katie had wanted me to go with her, she’d have said so. There are some things a person’s got to do alone. Emotions and thoughts don’t stir around inside you in quite the same way when other people are around, and the kinds of thoughts and feelings that get moving when you’re alone are good for you. I knew this was one of those times for Katie. She’d been going to her place in the woods since she was a little girl. It was where she learned to get in touch with herself and nature, where she learned to write poems and think and pray. And now that she was slowly becoming a woman, it was important to touch some of those things of the past every once in a while to feel whatever they might make her feel and let those feelings mature her all the more. It’s the same way it had been for me when I’d wanted to go back to the McSimmons place.
    She returned about an hour later. She was in a quiet mood.
    “It was sad, Mayme,” she said. “All the green was gone and it was muddy everywhere. But at least the big rock hadn’t gotten washed away. And everything will grow back.”
    She sighed and smiled. “I was thinking on the way back to the house,” she went on after a minute, “that if the water could change the landscape so much, what if it got into the cellar during the flood. So I thought we should look.”
    We went into the parlor, pulled back the rug, and lifted the door in the floor.
    “Oh, we’ll need a lantern,” said Katie as she began to step down into the darkness. “Would you mind getting one from the kitchen?”
    A few minutes later we were standing down on the hard dirt of the cellar looking about. Nothing was changed. And except for a little wetness in two of the corners and along one of the walls, there was no sign of the flood.
    Katie glanced about. There wasn’t much there, just the old chest where we’d found her uncle’s clothes and a few pieces of old furniture with stuff heaped on it, an oak barrel for storing potatoes, several lanterns that looked like they were rusting, and some shelves with a few things piled on them.
    “It looks all right,” said Katie. “At least the flood didn’t ruin everything.—Maybe I should bring one of those lanterns up,” she said, walking over toward where the furniture had been stored.
    She tried to pick up the largest