Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Heap got a temporary job with IBM but the contract was canceled. Checking into why, he found out that when he resigned, assured that quitting would not be held against him, his manager, under order from her manager, ticked Do Not Rehire on his exit interview, and the company had been damning him with faint praise to prospective employers. Behind his back.

The old blacklist--again. From Big Blue.

Heap and Brenda talked about it, and decided to move to Panama City, where the kids could hunt and camp and fish and play bluegrass music with their aunt and uncles, tell stories around the old campfire. Heap would move up and live in the trailer behind Granny Brown and Uncle Wayne. Owen would come up at Christmas and join him, enroll in school in Panama City.

Balder would stay with Brenda in Delray Beach until the summer. Brenda would put their house up for sale and continue to live and work in Delray Beach until the house sold. Then she'd move up.

By and by, the house sold. They bought a house on Martin Lake. Brenda found a job with a contractor and moved.

They were reunited as a family in a beautiful home on two acres of waterfront property with 119 live oak, pine, magnolia, and dogwood trees.

Heap called the house The Full Magnolia.

Potter named the outbuilding, or shed where he had his writing studio, The Slave Quarters.

Dion Wright, who visited them, said, "You're going to have trouble selling people the starving artist bit when they hear about this place."

He called the bluegrass festival they took him to in Chipley "a hootenanny."

He called Heap a "Living Fossil."

In an issue of Irregular Quarterly featuring Heap, he included a postpaid card to the Florida Arts Recognition Program asking them to name Heap Living Fossil.

I don't know how many cards they got, but they ignored them.