Saturday Sample Story--Boundaries

Photo by Dani Simmonds

I am re-editing the stories in my Twelve Nights of Christmas collection, which I had in the Kindle Prime program. As soon as the term runs out (two weeks from now), I am going to republish it with a new cover, re-branded as the 12 Nights of Christmas.  It'll be interesting to see how it does. I've been asking people how they liked their Kindle Prime experience and the answers have been amixed bag. Dani at Blog Book Tours (on FB) pointed me toward some people who were very, very happy with their results, but among my friends and colleagues, there hasn't been that much enthusiasm. I think for me, it comes down to the old, "Why leave money on the table?"  It's not that I sell large numbers of books at Barnes and Noble and Kobo, I don't. But I do sell some. And I just don't see "borrowing" translating to "sales." Thoughts?
Anyway, this is one of the stories from that collection, my version of "A Partridge in a Pear Tree." Enjoy.

Boundaries

Five families came west to Kansas, searching for a better life than the lives that had been shattered by the war. To begin with there were 16 adults and 14 children, three dogs, six goats, two cows, a small flock of chickens, three pigs and a stray kitten one of the children had picked up when the group passed through St. Louis.

The families arrived in summer and built their sod houses and planted small gardens for the kitchen and plowed their land to make it ready for the coming year.

They’d all been farmers back in Maryland, so they knew how harsh farming life could be.

At least they thought they knew until their first winter on their new land when the temperature reached minus 34 degrees and nearly one hundred inches of snow fell between October and March.

The flock of chickens didn’t survive, and one of the cows died too—even though the family that owned her kept her inside with them to keep her warm.