The Girl from Portland
Sarah Mitchell arrived on a rainy Tuesday in May 1964, the youngest of three children born to Margaret and Robert Mitchell in Portland, Oregon. The city was green and gray in equal measure — a place that seemed to encourage quiet children who watched the world from windows.
She was, by most accounts, a watcher. Her older brother Tom remembers her sitting under the oak tree at the end of the yard for hours, even when it rained. "Mom thought she was odd," Tom wrote recently. "I thought she was the most interesting person I knew."
The Mitchell household had little money and, Sarah recalls, an abundance of books. Her father worked at a printing company; her mother taught piano to the neighborhood children on a battered upright that listed slightly to the left. Music was present at nearly every meal.
The Notebooks Under the Mattress
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Building a Life
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