My One Hundred Adventures Read Online Free PDF

whiteness. And then, as if they have done this a thousand times, Mrs. McCarthy silently lies back on the bed and closes her eyes and Nellie moves her hands slowly and deliberately about six inches over her. She does something strange over Mrs. McCarthy’s head, as if she is pulling invisible things out of it.
    It takes about ten minutes and then Mrs. McCarthy sits up and smiles peacefully. “Oh my,” she says. “Oh my. That was powerful! Powerful!”
    â€œYes,” says Nellie. “I’ll be seeing you next week, then.”
    We go silently back down the stairs. I feel oddly peaceful, as if whatever Nellie was doing has affected me too.
    We get into the car without a word and drive on.
    Eventually this serenity fades, like bathwater seeping out a leaky drain, and I am sad that the real world and my usual feelings return and intrude. I begin to wonder if it was all in my head back there and I look at Nellie. She doesn’t look so coolly serene anymore either. What happened and why didn’t it last? I am too shy to ask and I’m not sure Nellie knows anyway.
    We are far out of town now. Nellie says we have to drive a long way to be in a Bible-dropping territory she hasn’t covered yet. I see long wild lupins and some kind of yellow wildflower I can’t identify and lots of fields of cows. I wish I had a flower book with me to give these yellow flowers a name. I ask Nellie if she knows what they are. She has her hands gripped on the steering wheel and her eyes bore holes down the road as if she is clearing a way ahead for us with her laser vision, and she looks neither to left nor to right.
    â€œWhat flowers? Never had much to do with flowers. Dairy country in these parts. Good ice cream.”
    I am surprised that someone so in tune with the universe is not interested in its flowers but perhaps she doesn’t pay attention to such trivia because she has big, important issues of good and bad energy to concentrate on. We stop at a small town to buy cones and slurp them up as we drive along. The ice cream is so full of fat it hardly drips. It’s like eating a mound of flavored butter. What does melt slides down the cone in a creamy lather. This is like nothing I have eaten before and I begin to feel the stir of excitement in my rib cage of adventures to be had and I smile.
    â€œDon’t worry, child, we’ll fix your bad energy,” says Nellie, and that puts an end to my contentment.
    We drive for a long time without a person to hand a Bible to. Then we come upon an old farmer walking down the road with his cows. I think the cows must have broken a fence somewhere and escaped and the farmer is taking them back. Either that or he takes them for walks the way some folks walk their dogs. It would be peaceful to walk some cows. They wouldn’t bark alarmingly. They would moo in celestial harmony.
    I am thinking this when Nellie stops the car suddenly, jolting me, and tries to hand the farmer a Bible out the window—we have a few on my lap at the ready. But the stopping of the car causes a ruckus with the cows, who begin to scatter in a frightened way that looks like the beginning of a stampede. The farmer waves us off with an irritated look. His peaceful cow walk has been disturbed. One of the cows brings its head too close to Nellie’s window and she gets in a panic and puts the car in the wrong gear, which makes an awful, loud grinding sound, which further inflames the cows who begin to race around in six directions at once with the farmer shouting and flapping his arms and cursing us. Nellie finally gets the car out of there before we are run over by cows. The sound of the farmer’s curses follows us down the road.
    â€œHe should have taken the Bible,” Nellie says, panting. “Now, that’s a man who could use a little positive energy.” Sweat drips off her forehead. If I’d been killed by a cow it would have been hard to explain to my