Mom

At one time when we were living at the old house in south Vidor, we experimented with raising rabbits, a "gift" from our home teacher, Brother Bob Moulton, who is Aunt Linda Hilton's dad. We had several different cages of rabbits, some suspended from the beams of the shed, some as wire boxes standing about a foot off the floor. We begin to have trouble with packs of dogs. One night they came, unaware to us, and somehow managed to pull many rabbits and baby rabbits through the wire holes in the cage. They had quite a good time, I suspect. In the morning the barn and field around the barn was littered with remains of their overnight rampage, i.e. a scene of carnage, mangled, bleeding, dead, or half-dead rabbits all around the barn. It was grisly and disturbing.

The next evening dad explained to Heavenly Father that he (dad) was the only thing that was standing between the helpless rabbits and the dogs. He promised Heavenly Father that if He would just let him know when the dogs were there, that he (Dad) would do his best to go out and protect and defend the helpless caged rabbits.

At the time we had a small set of wind chimes that hung from the ceiling fan in our bedroom. I think they had been there for months, innocuous and soft, but this particular night they behaved a little differently because in the middle of the night they started jangling so loudly that they woke me up from a sound sleep. The following is part of a journal entry about that night:

"Tuesday, October 19, 1982

 
          Last Thursday night (Friday morning) about 2:30 a.m. I woke up and became aware of the chimes (hung from a fan above our bed).  They were really clanging a lot it seemed.  Pretty soon I became aware that Johnny was awake beside me.  He quietly got up, got dressed and went out to the barn where he found all 3 of those dogs trying to get our rabbits.  He closed himself in there with them and commenced swinging with a stick. He got the big one a good blow or two before he got away.  One of the little ones escaped through the give at the bottom of the door.  The other little one he managed to corner and subdue.  He put him in a cage and the pound picked him up the next morning.
 
          When he came back in I asked how he knew to go out to the barn because I hadn’t heard anything from the bed.  He told me that the chimes were ringing so loud they woke him up and he decided the Lord must be trying to tell him something was wrong.  So he went and listened at the kitchen door and heard the dogs from there and knew to go out to the barn."

Note: One correction. It was pretty dark in our part of the neighborhood. When Johnny realized the dogs were in the barn, I don't think he actually took time to dress. He was playing the part of an avenging angel that night, and, if I remember correctly, in the almost total darkness, I suspect he looked the part.