Competitive! They check out each other more than the boys do! I'mnot sure that these boobs will fool all of them mom, and it only takesone to figure i... out and I'm toast!" I understand honey, let me check into it."Kathy, who wasn't suffering from the doubts I was, had made a lot offriends, all girls her age. That left me facing my dilemma alone. Momwas busy checking into a way to let me go to school, and make me as mucha girl as my friends, dad was pouting all the time, and I was wonderingonce. ’ Winter was the season of hardship. It brought want, sometimes starvation and always death, especially amongst the children. This was the season when the shaman’s services were most in demand and this year Ivory would share in her duties. She would help bury the dead, comfort the living, and seek succour and benison in the most unpromising wintry valleys. Already the swallows had flown off, the mammoth herds were restless and the sky was streaked by migrating geese. Sometimes there was a. Melody had begun stroking Lissa’s head, massaging her scalp. I contemplated sketching the scene, but instead I undressed and crawled up to join them on Lissa’s other side. Melody handed me a bottle of body oil. While she continued to work on Lissa’s scalp, I warmed oil in my hands and went to work on her shoulders.She was tight. Even after the long soak in the tub, Lissa was carrying tension that she just couldn’t let go. I kneaded her muscles, alternating between deep pressure to work out the. Eventually, however, the little voice that seemed to invade every one of her compensation tasks, spoke to her and asked politely, if somewhat smugly, ‘just why she was doing all the cleaning, and who was going to see the clean house anyway?’ Sue, having no correct answer for this whispered question, gave up on the furious house cleaning. Things got lax but the place looked ‘lived in’, was what she told herself. But secretly she knew that she added the ‘house cleaning’ to her list of things at.