Her mother returned from the kitchen, carrying a jiggling dish. “Who would like some Jell-O pudding?”
Margaret squealed with delight. “You made green! I love the green one best, Mommy!”
Aunt Lou followed with the dishes. “Special dessert for a special day. How exciting that you girls get to go to school now!”
Dot sat back, watching her mother serve, but her mind was spinning. “What’s J, Daddy? What’s ‘J’ for, Jell-O?”
He tapped dit-dah-dah-dah.
So began Dorothy’s quest to learn and memorize the Morse code alphabet. She already knew the regular alphabet, of course. Her mother had taught them that two years earlier. Now Dot’s father had given her a key to a whole new puzzle that promised worlds of fun. Day by day she took on more of the patterns, and once they were stuck in her head she went to her father for more.
“First you must learn to spell,” he had told her, pulling out paper and a pencil. “What word would you like to spell?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Sister.”
“All right. Here’s how to spell it in regular letters.” As he wrote out the six letters, they both said them out loud. Then he handed the pencil to her. “How would you tap each letter? Draw it underneath in dashes and dots.”
Pencil grasped tight in her curled fist, Dot drew three little points under each S.
“That’s right. Now the other letters.”
She bit her lip, her mind ticking through everything she had learned and memorized over the past few days. Her pencil pressed against thepaper again. “Two dots for ‘I.’ One dash for ‘T.’ Just one little dot for ‘E.’?” She hesitated. “What’s ‘R’? I forget!”
“Think, Dorothy.” He patted her head affectionately. “The answer is right in here.” As if he had brought it to the surface, “R” appeared. “Dit-dah-dit.”
“Excellent! How do you write that?”
“Dot-dash-dot.”
“That’s my girl. Now we put them together to make a word. Show me.”
It was as if a window opened in her mind, and her heart whirred like hummingbird wings. She read the code out loud, tapping with one finger as her father had done. “Margaret is my dot-dot-dot dot-dot dot-dot-dot dash-dot…” She grinned at him. “Dot-dash-dot.”
Morse code bored Margaret within a day or two. She learned it only so she could communicate with Dot, but her heart wasn’t in it. Their father noticed, and instead, he presented her with a small brass cylinder. The metal was tarnished and dented, but the vibrating needle in the centre caught her attention.
“What’s that?”
“This is a compass. It tells you which direction you’re going in.”
Margaret frowned. “Like forward?”
“A little more than that. You see this little needle? It will always point north.”
“North?”
He turned to Dot. “Dorothy, please bring me the map on my desk. The big paper rolled up, with the funny lines on it.”
“I know where that is,” Gus replied from down the hall. A moment later, he and Dot appeared in the dining room with the map. They helped her father spread it out on the table.
“Ah, yes. Thank you,” he said. “This, my dears, is a map of the whole world.”
“The whole world?” both girls exclaimed, their noses almost touching the paper. How fascinating to see it drawn like this, when all they’d ever imagined of the world was grass and trees and sky.
“Gus, have you seen this before?” her father asked.
“In school. A little.”
“What can you show me?”
