House of Purple Cedar

I always feared death by ice. Much more than death by fire. Even as a little girl listening to Brother Willis preach about how the world would end, I was never afraid of fire, of burning up. Fire was warm and if it got to be too hot, you just scooted away. The only real problem with fire was starting it in
the morning. Everybody else was asleep, and you had to climb out of bed and freeze your fingers fetching firewood so they could stay curled up and
comfy. “Rose, are you up yet?” Momma said every morning, while the moon still shone and the sun hadn’t even thought of waking up. The walls in our
house were so thin, she never had to shout. “Is it morning yet?” Daddy asked, and I could hear him roll over. I knew he covered his head with his pillow to block out the coming day. “It will be soon,” Momma always said. “No need to waste it.”
No need to waste it meant they could sleep for half an hour longer, but I better get up and start the morning fire. My grandma and grandpa, Amafo and Pokoni, lived with us too. I guess it’s better said we lived with them since this used to be their house. Daddy liked to tell about cutting the cedar and sawing the boards, helping Amafo build this house when he was still a boy. “I was just a neighbor kid, but I knew if I was a good worker, he’d let me court your mother someday,” my father used to say. My little brother Jamey always made a secret face when he heard this. But there were no secrets, not from Momma. “You don’t want to be like those lazy Willis boys, do you, Jamey?” she’d say. “They get whippings sometimes. You don’t want a whipping, do you?” Course that never happened to me or Jamey, neither one. We never got a whipping. But the Willis boys did––and always by their momma––never by their preacher daddy. I never liked seeing anybody get whipped, but especially not the Willis boys. I know they gave living Hades to their big
sister Roberta Jean, but there was just too many of ’em to expect anything good, and the how many of them there were, that wasn’t their fault.