with our eager fingers. She gave us exotic, sugary candies with chewy nut centers. But as the purple poplar shadows gobbled up the chalky ruins of the factory, and the last rays of the afternoon slanted in warm horizontal slabs along the dusty road toward town, she shooed us away to our homes, promising that she would be waiting there for us the next morning. She planned just to make that little shack her home for the night. There was a miniature, still efficient pot-bellied stove in on corner; she had her own quilts and a few other small necessities. We left her there, but not until we had seen her possessions safely into the shack. Her quilts were blue satin, thick and luxurious. We hardly noticed that they were much-used, shabby. Her hands we did notice as she unpacked doll-sized silver cups and spoons; they were incredibly small and they fluttered like rare, frightened birds. We were back early the next morning with treasurers that we had surreptitiously borrowed from our mothers' pantries sparkling marmalade, oranges and bananas, sweet cream, a tin of aromatic coffee. Juanita brushed strands of black hair from her sleep-freshened face with the back of one hand and laughed delightedly at us. We were overwhelmingly grateful that we could delight her, that we could evoke those smiles that flashed more whitely than anything we had ever seen. We never took our eyes from her as she swung those enchanted skirts over the splintered floor boards of the shack. Her figure was agile, her waist nipped into nothing. It was this day that we began to know of her magic. Somehow we were not surprised at the appearance of the crystal ball, the charts and diagrams with strange figures and mysterious sounding names. We all knew, even without discussing it among ourselves, that our mothers would not approve of these wonderful, other-worldly things, nor would Miss Dibble, our Sunday-morning-Good-Book-story-teller. But if Juanita had produced Satan himself, there on the spot, we would have welcomed him as one of us. Many, many hours, following that first hour of introduction to the mystique, were crammed with imaginary exotic voyages, with joy-of-being-alive-laughter. We bombarded her with wild flowers cascades of wild lilacs, jonquils, sky-blue corn flowers. She especially loved the spicy sweet Williams that blanketed pinkly the slopes of the railway grades. During those hours, Juanita flung wide the great doors of a new world to us. Her key was strung on a golden chain of words; but it all amounted to magic. She knew the constellations as if they were old friends; she taught us to read the stars and to interpret the wind. She taught us to see beauty in low-hanging black clouds; and we learned the language of the rain on the roof in the quiet moments before the deep sleep of childhood. We came to expect a beautiful experience around 6 every corner of the day, and we were seldom disappointed. But perhaps the greatest gift she gave us was time time to wonder, time to speak of the hundreds of unimportant, ridiculous, wide awake dream things that no one else could listen to. After a few days, there began the mutterings around the town, dark-sounding names, the meanings of which we did not comprehend. Then one morning she was gone. There was left not a trace of her about the leaning gray shack. It was as if she had never set foot in the place. Dust and cobwebs seemed to have settled in immediately, as they had been before she came. We went on about the business of living. We held Juanita in our collective consciousness as the remnant of a dear lost dream. Then, suddenly, the following spring, on a high-skied June morning, she was back. She was our Juanita, though a bit weary, a little less gay. For a week that spring, our hours were gilded with the remembered magic magic and Juanita. The days were full; when the sun slipped into the shadows of night we left her there alone. We were almost prepared for her disappearance as the year before but we were confident that spring would blossom into summer, that summer would fade into fall and winter, that spring would come again and bring her back. The following year was different. Juanita was different, withdrawn, almost melancholy. Her dark eyes were shadowed with a delicate blueness, her fragility was intense. The muddy rivers of gossip in town swirled into treacherous currents. There were snickering insinuations and indignant accusations about Juanita and the artist. We knew him only by sight. He did not mix with the people of town, or even go out where he could be seen very often. He did not seem to notice people much. We knew his wife. She was thin as a hoe handle and her blond hair tuck to her head in tight little waves and sausages. She was furious with us whenever she caught us cutting through the corner of her rose garden on our route to and from school. Her rose bushes assumed grotesque forms, and there always seemd to be more thorns than roses. Juanita was suddenly gone, and the talk ceased after a while. But the following spring brought her back, the incredible, vital Juanita, the glowing, many-textured presence. Her magic penetrated deeper into our lives. The older ones of us grew to love her more deeply; the newer, younger members of our cult fell into step with us as naturally as breathing. That was our last spring, in a sense, for when Juanita came to our town again she did not stop at the shack. She 7