Cut and Pasted
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Right after I learned how to cut and paste on Mom's computer, it happened to me. I was cut right out of my old life and pasted into a new one. Two times. First, Daddy lost his job. He's an airline pilot. Or was. That's when I learned a new word--downsize. That means lots of pilots were laid off. "Laid off" means nobody needs them.

About a week later we were loading the dishwasher after dinner when Mom and Daddy got in a big fight. At first they just talked, but I could tell they were going to start yelling any minute.

Mom was trying to get Daddy to look for some other kind of job. He didn't want to. His face got all tight and frowny even thinking about it. Every idea she had, he just said, "No way!"

"Why are you so stubborn, Ted? You know you can't be a pilot now. Nobody's hiring. Things might be different in a year or two." Her eyes got wide. "I just had an idea! For now, why don't we join that community I lived in before I met you?"

Daddy's face looked like a red balloon that was about to pop, but she kept on talking. "You wouldn't have to have a job. We could both work for the community businesses. You'd have more time to spend with Dorthea, too. Then maybe some day they'll need more pilots again."

She said something else, but Daddy started roaring as loud as a big truck, and I couldn't hear her. "You expect me to live on a commune with a bunch of drop-outs and losers? I'm a pilot! I belong in the skies! Can't you understand?" He was really mad.

Mom got mad, too, but she was more like hissing than loud when I could hear her again: "Don't you call the people at Wild Wind Community losers! I lived there for two years! Does that make me a loser?" She dumped in some soap powder, shoved the dishwasher door shut, and yanked the knob over to start it.
Now Daddy had to talk over the sound of pouring water. "You wised up and married a winner--me!" He folded his arms and leaned back against the sink.

"Well, look what that got me! An unemployed pilot. Some winner!"

He slapped his hand on the counter so loud I jumped. The soapbox fell over, too. "That's not fair, Jacqueline! I did all right till now. It's not my fault I got laid off and you know it!"

"It's your fault you won't listen to reason now!"

"Reason? You tell me to give up my career and go hide in the woods with a pack of misfits and you call that reason?" He was yelling right in her face.

"Don't shout at me! You're scaring Dorthea! Don't you care about her? Can't you get off your high horse and take a little responsibility?"

I didn't know about high horses, but responsibility was a word I heard a lot. Every time I forgot to help clear the table after dinner. Or clean my room on Saturdays.

I was crying when Daddy slammed the door and went out. Mom held me and read my favorite stories to me till I felt better. I was asleep in my room when voices in the living room woke me up later that night. I got out of bed and opened my door to listen. Daddy sounded funny, like drunk guys in movies. This time it was Mom who started yelling.

Then I heard her scream and I ran into the living room just as Daddy slammed the door and was gone again. She was on the floor holding her arm and moaning. When she saw me she said, "Get dressed, Dorthea. I can't leave you alone. You have to come with me to the hospital." She managed to get on her feet, still holding her arm. "Help me pin a towel so it supports my arm. I can drive with one hand."

I had to sit in the waiting room at the hospital a long time. Then Mom came back with her arm in a sling and said the x-ray showed a crack in her smallest arm bone, but nothing was broken. She showed me her big purple bruise.

That was the beginning of the first cut-and-paste for us. The very next afternoon, Mom was waiting for me outside my school. "We're moving to an apartment, Dorthea," she said. "Come on, I'll take you over to meet our roommate."

She drove me to a big old house, and we climbed some outside stairs. Inside, a barefoot woman was sitting at a kitchen table with books and papers all over it. Her dark hair was in a scrunchy. Her belly button showed between her cotton knit top and shorts.

"This is Stacy Irving, Dorthea," Mom said. I nodded, but I was looking at our dishes and pans stacked on the counter. I saw my name in big black letters on three of the boxes on the floor.

"Hi, Dorthea," Stacy said. She had this kind of fake smile. "I'm a college student, and this is finals week, so you can't be making a lot of noise while I'm studying." I guess the only thing she cared about was how much noise I might make. Did she think I usually went around whooping it up?

Mom and I had to share one bedroom, so we left most of our stuff in our old house. I don't know what Daddy thought about being alone. I didn't see him again.

Mom got a job answering phones and stuff for people who are on vacation. School was out by then, and I couldn't find any kids on our new block. Stacy worked nights as a DJ at a radio station, so Mom paid her to keep an eye on me on the days Mom got called to work.

I read library books and watched TV. Sometimes I went outside on the sidewalk and played all by myself with my jump rope and pogo stick. I made my own peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, so Stacy didn't have to do anything. One day she did take me to her radio station, though. It was cool to watch the daytime DJ through a window. But not as cool as Daddy's airport.

Mom was always complaining about her work--low pay and no respect. After a few weeks she started talking to me about Wild Wind. "It's a community where everyone is treated like an equal," she said. "They wouldn't expect me to bring them coffee like the men at work do. Wild Winders would never say, 'I'll have my girl take care of it,' meaning me. Girl!" Mom made a face. "When do I get to be a woman?"

She's tall and big-boned. She says I'm tall, too, for being not quite seven. We're proud of being tall, so we stand up straight. Some tall people slump over. Mom says they're trying to be shorter like everyone else. But we think it's okay to be different.

She put her hands on my shoulders now, looking in my eyes. "Some communities cost thousands of dollars to join. But Wild Wind doesn't cost anything." She waited for me to say something, but I didn't know what to say. I nodded and hoped that was the right thing to do.

I guess it was, because she smiled. "Everybody does a fair share of the work," she said. "Wild Wind has sheep, and they make rugs to sell out of the wool. They have cows and goats, too, and sell cheese made from the milk. Women can do farm work if they like. And men can cook and take care of kids. All work is equal."

She took a big breath and pulled me close in a hug. "I want us to go to Wild Wind Community to live, Dorthea. It's the best place for us to be right now. I know you'll love it."

I pulled away so I could look at her. "Will we ever see Daddy again?" Daddy hated Wild Wind, I remembered.

She turned away so I couldn't see her face. I thought she wasn't going to answer me. When she did, her voice was real soft. "I don't know." It's scary when grown-ups don't know the answers either.

In July we took a Greyhound bus to North Falls, Iowa. Mom said it was the closest city to Wild Wind Community. So I was cut and pasted a second time.

We were sitting in a hamburger place where the bus dropped us off. Our luggage was on the other seat in our booth. I was sipping a strawberry milk shake, looking out the window. I saw a woman in jeans with kinky blond hair get out of a big black van. She came inside and walked over to our booth.

"Are you Jackie and Dorothy Estes? I'm Gaia, from Wild Wind."

Mom gave her that stiff smile she always has when anyone calls her Jackie. "Jacqueline," she said. Mom thinks cute names like Jackie are for small women.

"I'm sorry," Gaia said. "I should know better than to use a nickname. We call people whatever they want to be called at Wild Wind. But of course you know all about it. Your letter said you used to be a Wild Winder. That was before I joined."

Mom's smile was a real one now as she put her arm around me. "My daughter is Dorthea, not Dorothy. Thea means goddess." Just then I slurped my straw. Oops!

They pretended not to notice. "Dorthea," the woman said to me. "What a wonderful name! My name Gaia means earth goddess. I chose it for myself. Lots of Wild Winders choose their own names."

I could tell already this Wild Wind Community was going to be a weird place. I was right--it sure was different. It was way out in the country at the end of a long, narrow dirt road. I could smell farm animals as soon as we got out of the van. A big yellow dog and a fat black one jumped up on me, licking my hands and face. I liked that part--I never had a dog before.

Right away I saw that the buildings weren't normal. Some of them still had bark on their boards! They were half hidden by trees, so it was like living in the woods. Mom and I each got our own bedroom. But now we had to share the rest of our house with nine other people. And one of them was a baby who bawled a lot.
It wasn't called a house, either. It was called a residence hall. And it had a name--Emerald City, where the Wizard of Oz lived. There were ten bedrooms along two hallways, with an open area in the middle for kitchen and living room. A shower room was there, too.

Wild Wind had five residence halls, but ours was the only one with a kitchen and shower. Most community members had to go to the dining hall to eat. They had to go to the bathhouse to shower. Everyone could walk to work, though, because the rug factory and cheese factory were just up the path from the residence halls.

Mom said people with little kids were the lucky ones who got rooms in Emerald City. The first time she lived here, her room was in an old hall called Rhapsody. Emerald City wasn't even built yet then. And I wasn't born yet, either.

In August another family joined. They had a girl who was ten, named Shandra. But all the rooms in our hall were full, so they couldn't live in Emerald City. Mom said it was lucky we joined in July. Shandra had a mom and dad and teenage sister, and they all came with her to Wild Wind. She was the lucky one, I thought.

Mom loved Wild Wind. "We can live here forever!" she told me when I asked how long we had to stay. "I don't have to get a job! You can hang out with me while I spin yarn in the rug shop. Isn't that great? Or you can stay here and there's always a child-care worker on duty and other kids to play with. Besides, I can count some child-care work as part of my required hours of labor."

"But I want to move back home, Mom." I didn't care if my voice was whiney.

"We are home, Darling. No more moves!"

Pooh! Just when I wanted to be cut and pasted again! "Can I call Daddy?"

She looked surprised. Then she frowned. Then she smiled, like she just had a happy thought. "All right. I'll email him that you'll be calling every Sunday afternoon at two o'clock. That way he'll be sure to be home."
Her smile got bigger. "Wait, I have a better idea. I'll set you up with your own email address and you can write to him yourself."

I was glad Mom gave me that computer disk last year to teach my fingers their letters. That was almost as soon as my head knew how to spell words! But Daddy's fingers didn't know how to type. It took him a long time to "hunt and peck" each letter. So he didn't like email and only checked his messages about once a week. His answers were always really short.

He was happy when I called him on the phone, though. Mom would sit in the office of the rug shop with me every Sunday while I talked. She would say stuff like, "Tell him about the party we had for your birthday!" Or "Why don't you invite him to visit us here?" I think she was still hoping Daddy would come live with us at Wild Wind.

He told me he was taking classes to learn how to be a security officer. A security officer could protect people from hijackers on planes. He would still get to fly, but he wouldn't be in the pilot's seat. He didn't promise to come see me, though.

Summer was over, then, and I started school in town, taking a school bus with Shandra and Sammy. Sammy was five. He and his mom and baby sister Anna lived in Emerald City, too. His mom told me Anna only bawled when she was cutting teeth. I asked Sammy if he had a daddy. He shook his head no and wouldn't talk about it.

The other two kids in Emerald City didn't go to school in town. Jamie and Star got home-schooled. I didn't play with them as much. They always seemed to be off in the woods with one of the grownups at Wild Wind, learning the names of birds and trees and wildflowers and stuff. Or helping people take care of the farm animals. Or watching while people spun wool into yarn or made cheese. Sometimes I did that, too.
I still didn't feel like Wild Wind was my home. But I was learning stuff I never learned in our family. One day I learned something Mom and Daddy didn't even know. I'm sure they didn't, 'cause if they knew, everything could have been different.

It seemed like any other day: Shandra and Sammy got off the school bus with me. Our two dogs Nugget and Hector came running when they saw our bus, the way they always do. We played with them for a while, then went to Emerald City to fix our usual after-school snack of juice and graham crackers with peanut butter.

After that Sammy went outside to play in the sand box with the dump trucks. Shandra and I were tired of trucks, so we decided to play with the West family dolls that have a horse for each doll. Mom said she had a West family set when she was my age--that's how old they were! But they weren't even broken and hardly anything was missing. We had everything but one of the bridles and a couple of cowboy hats.

I wanted Josie West, but Shandra grabbed Josie's horse. "You give me that horse!" I told her. "I live in Emerald City and you don't, so I get firsts on all the toys in this house! I choose Josie and her horse."

"You don't either get firsts," she said. "You had Josie yesterday and it's my turn today. You can have Mrs. West and her horse."

So I got a handful of her soft fluffy hair and pulled, and she grabbed my long hair and gave it a yank and we were both hollering and rolling around until I hit my head on the coffee table.

"Mockingbird!" I yelled at the guy who was the child-care worker on Friday afternoons. "Shandra made me conk my head!" I smacked her hard on the leg.

He was at the door now, brushing sand off the seat of his jeans before coming in. "Both of you, pull apart," he said, crossing the kitchen area to the living area. You sit in this chair, Dorthea. You sit on the couch, Shandra. We're going to set up a fair fight."

"What?" Shandra and I said it at the same time. I would have laughed at that usually, but I was too mad.
"The first thing to do in a fair fight is make rules you both agree to. Okay? Like, no hitting. Can you both agree to that one?"

"How can we fight if we can't hit?" I wanted to know.

"You're going to fight with words. Or pictures, if you want. So, can you agree to no hitting? Hitting is not okay at Wild Wind, remember?"

I did remember that. Mom really liked it that no violence was allowed at Wild Wind. I started thinking about that time Daddy got mad and hit her and cracked her bone. She said we moved out because she wasn't going to give him a second chance to hit either one of us.

I wish we had lived here before that happened. Mockingbird would have made Mom and Daddy sit in different chairs to fight. And Daddy couldn't have hit Mom, and we would all be together now.

"Shandra is the oldest," I told Mockingbird. Then I got loud like Daddy so she'd know how mad I was. "She shouldn't pick on a little kid!" I wasn't all that much shorter than Shandra, but I was a lot younger.

She was just as loud: "Dorthea is a selfish brat! She won't take turns!"

Mockingbird held up a hand like a traffic cop stopping cars. "You're both shouting. First let's make a rule that you have to use a quiet voice." He sat on the couch on the side next to my chair and looked at Shandra sitting on the other side of him. "Okay?" Shandra nodded. Then he looked at me, so I nodded, too.

"But she called me" --Mockingbird put a finger to his lips--"a selfish brat!" I whispered the last part.

"Would you like to make a rule about not calling names?" he asked.

"Yeah. And anyway, a kid in her class told me she's a teacher's pet, so there!" I stuck out my tongue at Shandra.

"Isn't that calling names?" Mockingbird asked me. Then he grinned. "Shall we see who can make the meanest face?"

I looked at Shandra. She started to make her bug-eye face at me, but stopped and put on her teacher's pet look instead. Snot! I thought. But I didn't say it out loud.

"I have an idea," Mockingbird said. "I'll give you each some paper and crayons and you can draw mean faces to show how mad you are."

So I pulled my chair up to the coffee table and started drawing. Shandra was drawing at the other end of the table. It was so quiet I could hear Sammy making motor noises out in the sand box. I even heard him crashing trucks together, like always.

I drew a face that looked like a dragon with a big flame coming out of its mouth and lots of big, fierce teeth. When I got my dragon all colored a shiny green with orange fire, I held it up to show Shandra. She laughed.
She held up the picture she made of a brown smiley face and a pink frowny face. I knew she meant she was the nice face and I was the mean one. So I took another sheet and drew a picture of a pink smiley face and a brown frowny one and held it up.

She held up her picture of two purple dragons dancing with big smiles all full of sharp teeth and one big yellow fire that came out of both their mouths. I laughed.

"Do you think you're ready now to work out who gets to play with which doll and horse?" Mockingbird asked.

"I think we should take turns," Shandra said.

"I think whoever lives here should get first pick," I said.

"At least you're both talking quietly and no one is hitting anyone," Mockingbird said. "But you both just keep repeating the same demand. Any new ideas?"

"Dorthea could let me play with Josie and her horse today, and I could let her go first if we want to play dominoes later."

"I want to play dominoes right now!" I said.

"All right. But after we finish with dominoes, I get Josie."

"Only today. Tomorrow I get first pick."

"And the day after that I get first pick."

"But that means she's the one who got her way," I said to Mockingbird. "What's fair about that?"

"It means the fair fight isn't over yet, because you don't have an agreement. Do you have any other ideas for how to decide who gets to play with what?"

"We could roll dice," Shandra said. "Whoever gets the highest number gets first pick."

Mockingbird looked at me. "Will that work for you, Dorthea?"

"What if she always rolls the highest number?"

"That could just be for our first game," Shandra said. "Then whoever didn't get first pick that time could have first pick for the second game.

"What about Sammy?" I asked. I noticed that Mockingbird was on his way to the door. We didn't need him now.

"Okay," Shandra said, "the two who didn't get first pick could roll dice for the second game."

"All right. Now let's play dominoes. You said I could go first."

Well, I'm glad I know how to fight fair, and I'm sorry Mom and Daddy didn't learn that when they were my age. One time all five of us kids got into it over which ones got to measure the flour and peanut butter and stuff and which ones would stir the cookie dough and roll it into balls and squash them with a fork.

So Shandra and I taught the others our rules. Sammy wanted to add a rule that girls don't get to interrupt boys until they get done talking. But we changed it to no one gets to interrupt any one, so it would be equal.

Now when we get mad at each other, we don't stay mad very long. We know how to fix the problem ourselves. And even if Shandra is the oldest, she doesn't get to decide things unless the rest of us agree. And Sammy gets to finish what he's saying even if it takes him forever. (That's the hardest rule to follow.)

Mom is proud of me for knowing how to fight fair. And proud of all of us because she says Wild Wind helps us live lightly on the earth. I was telling her about what my teacher said about trying to leave a light footprint.

A heavy footprint on the earth is like burning lots of oil and coal and gas and making radioactive wastes that no one knows what to do with. And dumping poisons everywhere--into the air and on food growing in the fields and into the water.

Mom said that at Wild Wind, sixty people get by with only ten vehicles and three washing machines and three dryers. And we each have one room instead of a whole house for every family. So we use less energy now than we did before we came here. And that means we're leaving a lighter footprint on the earth.

I still want to live with my daddy. He did tell me that he plans to come here to see me. Soon. As soon as he gets the job he wants. But just for a visit. Mom said Daddy is having a hard time letting go of the old world we used to live in. Even if it's not there any more.

But I'm not giving up. I'm helping to make a new world. Like, we want to cut out what hurts people and paste in something better. That's what I'm going to tell Daddy when he comes to see me. It hurts to have him cut out of my world. I want him to paste himself closer.