Morgaine was repulsed by the diet of crows. “Yucky. They eat garbage and dead stuff.”

Even though she was disgusted by how the crow pecked away at roadkill, the bird seemed to like her, never hopping away as it did from me.

“A part of the life cycle, Morgaine,” our father told her as he picked her up and swung her to his shoulders. “You see, the crow is prehistoric. It will be here long after we’re gone.”

Ocean told us people were scarring the earth, that one civilization after another had been wiped out because of arrogance, a sense of invincibility, forcing the ways of men and progress on the land. But nature would only tolerate so much. He’d explain how vaccinations were creating legions of zombie children, implanting illnesses, making us vulnerable to the coming plague.

To the west of the bench by the perilous cliff was an old abandoned graveyard with toppled tombstones, people who’d died of the Spanish flu. It was a flu they caught in reaction to the First World War, Ocean said, their immune systems weakened by the horrors inflicted on humanity by powermongers.

“And look at what’s happening in Lebanon now. The poor Palestinians. It’s a mess, Apsara.”

Apsara was what he called my mother, Sanskrit for celestial nymph. She would step in when he ranted, interrupting him with talk about her herb garden. She was growing meadowsweet and valerian and lemon balm. She planted sea buckthorn and it was growing steadily, covered in brilliant orange berries from autumn into winter. The garden was small at first but after a few years my mother expanded it. It thrived with her careful attention and by the time I was six the garden was thick and lush. When I came home from school Morgaine and I would play, chasing each other over the paths through the garden, our footsteps releasing scent from the aromatic creeping thyme which grew in between the stepping stones.

My father wanted me homeschooled, and my mother wanted me at school. Ocean said school would brainwash us. And when the winter weather blew, we might freeze to death waiting for the school bus on the dirt road. It was then she had started to grow weary, the sleepless nights and constant tending to little children layered in with the endless cooking and gardening, and my father’s ceaseless ideas. She knew she would be the homeschooler, not Ocean. We didn’t even have a globe because my father felt it would give us a limited sense of the world. He would hold up his hands and say the earth was an endless expanse. We were pure energy.

Sometimes, but not very often, he’d take us to see his mother when he went down the Mountain to town for groceries. My father usually left shopping to my mother, but sometimes she’d complain of a headache and he’d pack us in the truck. Grammy would stand in her apron on the steps of her old house, hands on her hips, telling him he should get a real job, how he was being ridiculous. He stopped bringing us down to see her. She wanted to take us to church on Christmas Eve. He called that “Yule.” He liked the Easter Bunny more than the crucifix. He was all for fertility, he said.