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| 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.
I grew up in a house of readers. My mother read mysteries; my father popular history with an emphasis on Civil War biographies. My sister preferred non-fiction as well, especially social histories and examinations of culture; my brother is a more eclectic reader who bounces back and forth and often recommends books to me. I read everything and have turned my love of reading into a career. Who knew?
Unlike a lot of people I know, I am a big proponent of phonics because that's how I was taught to read. I didn't know how to read when I entered school but I could recognize some words because one or the other of my parents read to me every night. (And more often than not it was my father, who loved, loved, loved words. He knew that kids like the sound of silly words and he was a lawyer, so he taught us all phrases like posse comitatus and delighted in hearing us parrot them back. He also taught us the meaning. How many eight year olds can define the term? Which may explain why my brother became a lawyer, so he'd have a chance to use all those ornate Latin phrases.)
We've all seen the iconic image of "Rosie the Riveter" rolling up her sleeves and proclaiming, "We Can Do It." The image we know was created by Pittsburgh artist Howard Miller. the model was Geraldine Hoff Doyle, a 17-year-old working as a metal stamping machine operator in Ann Arbor.
It's such a powerful image that even though Norman Rockwell later painted a "Rosie the Riveter" cover for Saturday Evening Post, the Miller poster is the one we remember.
