Jake turned down the hallway of his two-story farmhouse and headed for the kitchen. The land had fulfilled a dream just as his father had promised and had provided money in the bank, as well as dowries for his sisters. Thirty-three years old and just beginning to think about what he wanted to do for himself. Jake had made it through his sister’s suitors, blizzards and a rocky start to where he found himself now. Years later he would have said the worst time was when Flossie went to her first dance and Gloria’s husband Will had begun hanging around. A barely cleared farm, a half-built house and no relatives nearby to help. The first five years from that day had been the hardest he would have sworn at the time. Jake could still picture himself at the ripe old age of sixteen holding his sisters’ hands as men lowered their mother and father’s caskets into the bleak South Dakota prairie.įlossie was nine the day they had died and Gloria a mere three-years-old.
Her happiness had been the last remaining item on his mental list, finally clearing a path for his own plans since his sisters’ upbringing had fallen to him when their parents had both died of influenza. Gloria was twenty, married a year and expecting her first child in the fall. Jake Shelling stood in the doorway of his home and breathed a sigh of relief and happiness as his youngest sister rolled away in the wagon.
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