I poured my heart into the garden, the goats, splitting the firewood. My arms grew strong and muscular and my hands developed a crushing grip that I enjoyed using when being introduced the Dad's logger friends. They were always surprised to meet a young woman with a grip that was stronger than their own! I didn't cry constantly anymore...not in the daytime anyway, but I had become grim, old before my time, when I wasn't busy flirting with prospective husbands.

Summer sped past me. Time meant nothing, because there was no Daniel to wait for any longer. Every day was only another day that he didn't follow through on his intention to be friends, the empty promise mocking me. I kept planning my little farm, because I still preferred that idea to marrying a random man, still cringed at the thought of other hands touching me, of looking into anyone else's eyes but his. The problem was that this appeared to be yet another promise (this time by Mom) that wasn't going to come through. I told her that if I was going to pour a lot of work into the site I'd selected, I wanted a deed. I didn't want to put a lot of work into it and then have them log it or sell it.

And then there was the mortgage she'd just taken out, for $20,000, with no real source of income with which to pay it off. Between the logging, the constant sales of firewood, and Dad's timber cruising, and the theft of my and Sarah's savings, the land was almost paid off when Mom got that mortgage. What was worse, she didn't seem to have a good plan for paying it off. I knew nothing at all about money, but I was steadfastly opposed to debt as a matter of principle. Not only did she not have a plan for paying it off, she was spending money like it was going out of style! There was a company called Fingerhut, from which she bought all kinds of junk we didn't really need, piles of stuff, and when we got it, it was never as nice as the pictures in the catalog; it was cheap stuff, cheaper than what we would find in Walmart today. She blew money all over, buying people extravagant gifts. The mortgage scared me. And of course, now that the land was mortgaged, she couldn't really sign off part of it to me anymore.

Although Larry frequently helped us with the firewood, I don't think he ever got any kind of monetary compensation for his help or for the use of his huge flated truck with sides. The truck could hold six cords of firewood, and we generally filled it up every week. Larry and Raphah and I did the bulk of the work, yet none of us ever got paid for it.

Occasionally, however, there were other compensations. Dad bought me an old pickup truck, a faded red Ford Chomedy. How I loved that truck, even though I couldn't drive it anywhere except for the logging roads on and around our place, to load up firewood with! He bought Sarah an old blue station wagon without a title. Then I found a Welsh pony advertised for only $50, and so we acquired Missy, who became Rachel's. Most of these things were bartered for with firewood, not paid for in cash. And then we bartered for 50 chickens, all Rhode Island Red roosters with beady eyes and sharp beaks that they weren't afraid to use....

But aside from the truck, I thought our best trade was Abraham, an Alpine buck. He was tall with a long boned body and a full set of horns, glossy black with white markings. Despite the horns, he wasn't aggressive at all. I thought he was beautiful, and hoped we would get nice kids from him.