The frequent wrecks, and the fact that in two of them the cars had come right off the highway onto our land, made me very glad that the front of our motel was sixty feet from the highway. A hundred and sixty feet would have been safer! And after a truck, struck by a car when it was trying to make a left turn into Moe's restaurant, rammed into the garage of cabin 16--which corresponded to the children's bedroom on the other side--I rearranged the furniture in their room, in such a way that neither David's bed nor Donna's crib was near the side of the wall that was closest to the highway. Watering the calendulas and the roses that Oliv Snyder had planted in front of the office was, I felt, one of the most hazardous jobs connected with running the motel. The flowers in the tip end of the rock-enclosed triangle were only about six feet from the edge of the highway. And six feet from the edge of a highway where busses hurtle past and trucks roar by and there is no speed limit, and where cars are continually cutting in and out of traffic to go to the cafe or to the bar or to one of the motels, and where wrecks are a common occurrence, is a locality that not even Lloyds of London would care to insure against anything, at any premium. But it wasn't only highway accidents as prospective items for the Banning paper that clamored for my attention. Things happened all the time, with our motel usually the geographic center. There was the civic news picked up from gossip around the motel and at meetings of the motel owners' association. There were the miscellaneous odds and ends about fires, sicknesses, promotions, and so forth, that drift naturally through a busy, public place like the office of a motel. And there were the trivial "personals" so dear to the heart of a country paper editor. I had developed such a nose for news that I couldn't let any of these pass by without dashing to the typewriter and slamming out a few paragraphs about it. If David so much as mentioned that a certain playmate of his had to hurry home from school because an uncle from Michigan was coming to visit, I had to find out about it, even if it meant tracking down the child's parents through his address at school, and asking them point-blank if they had a visitor--and if so, how about a few details. At first I fought against this compulsion to track down every potential however-minor story. But, for hours after I conquered the urge to follow a certain lead, I would feel a gnawing sense of guilt, a feeling of having left something unfinished. It was a familiar feeling; I have experienced it many times after failing to turn back a page of a magazine to see whether that ad read "You must try Whippersnapper's Mange Medicine" or "You should try Whippersnapper's Mange Medicine." I've experienced it after failing to count the exact number of stairs I climb in a given flight. I always experience it if, after idly making creases in one side of my skirt, I neglect to make an