Read A Season for Tending Online
Authors: Cindy Woodsmall
A Season for Tending
B
OOKS BY
C
INDY
W
OODSMALL
A
DA’S
H
OUSE SERIES
The Hope of Refuge
The Bridge of Peace
The Harvest of Grace
S
ISTERS OF THE
Q
UILT SERIES
When the Heart Cries
When the Morning Comes
When the Soul Mends
N
OVELLAS
The Sound of Sleigh Bells
The Christmas Singing
The Scent of Cherry Blossoms
N
ONFICTION
Plain Wisdom: An Invitation into an Amish Home
and the Hearts of Two Women
A SEASON FOR TENDING
PUBLISHED BY WATERBROOK PRESS
12265 Oracle Boulevard, Suite 200
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80921
The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Cindy Woodsmall
Cover design by Kelly L. Howard; photography by Kelly L. Howard and Jutta Klee
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States by WaterBrook Multnomah, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc., New York.
WATERBROOK and its deer colophon are registered trademarks of Random House Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Woodsmall, Cindy.
A season for tending : a novel / Cindy Woodsmall.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-73003-9
1. Amish—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3623.O678S43 2012
813’.6—dc23
2012021263
v3.1
In memory of Raymond Woodsmall Sr. (1897–1977)
and my father-in-law, Raymond Woodsmall Jr. (1922–2011)
and dedicated to Uncle Jack Woodsmall
These men are the original apple orchard overseers
.
Contents
Apple orchards are a large part of the Woodsmall family history, and while writing the Amish Vines and Orchards series, I relied on the skilled experience and vivid recollections of a former apple farmer, Jack Woodsmall of Sterling, Massachusetts.
For nearly fifty years, Raymond Woodsmall Sr., my husband’s grandfather, was an overseer of an apple orchard in Leominster, Massachusetts. My father-in-law and his younger brother Jack worked on that apple orchard from the time they were little boys until they left home to serve in the military.
That orchard is called Sholan Farms, and the original farmhouse was built in the 1730s. Although Raymond Woodsmall Sr. never owned the land or the house, he moved into the original farmhouse before the Depression as a young man in his prime and remained there as an overseer of the orchard until he was no longer capable of such hard work. He then made room for a younger overseer and moved from the original farmhouse to a smaller place on the land, but he continued helping with the orchard until a few years before he died.
My husband grew up making yearly visits with his family to that farmhouse where his grandparents lived, and he spent hours walking the orchard with his grandpa and sitting under apple trees, mesmerized by the stories his grandpa told. Our children sat around the dinner table listening to their dad share those same stories.
Grandpa Woodsmall saw the apple orchard through droughts, floods, blizzards, pestilence, and the worst tragedy of all, the Great Hurricane of 1938, which nearly destroyed the orchard. He and his two sons worked long, hard years to restore the apple trees.
Time passed, and his two sons joined the military. They never returned to work the orchard again.
In 1982 the house sustained damage from a fire, and what was left of the home was dismantled, sold, and shipped to unknown destinations. Later, the
orchard was abandoned. It was during this time I first walked that land. While viewing the acres of dying trees, I longed for what had once existed.
Clearly others were stirred too. In 2001 the Sholan Farms Preservation Committee (SFPC) purchased the land. Soon afterward, a new group was formed, Friends of Sholan Farms (FOSF), and they took on the task of revitalizing as much of the orchard as possible. Today on twenty acres of the original sixty-acre farm is a thriving orchard where families from across the States can come and pick their own apples. The land now produces four thousand bushels of apples per year. I know Grandpa Woodsmall would be pleased.
Welcome to Amish Vines and Orchards.
Come with me into the Amish Country of Pennsylvania, into an apple orchard farmed in the same way Grandpa Woodsmall and his sons farmed all those years ago. Let’s take a journey that will be a tapestry of what was, what is, and—perhaps—what will be.
ONE
It’s time …
Emma’s voice rose from the past, encircling Rhoda and bringing a wave of guilt. Unyielding, unforgiving guilt.
Rhoda plucked several large strawberries from the vine and dropped them into the bushelbasket. “Time for what?” she whispered.
The moment the words left her mouth, she glanced up, checking her surroundings. She quickly looked beyond the picket fence that enclosed her fruit and herb garden but saw no one. Her shoulders relaxed. When townsfolk or neighbors noticed Rhoda talking to herself, fresh rumors stirred. Even family members frowned upon it and asked her to stop.
It’s time …
Emma’s gentle voice echoed around her for a second time.
“Time for what?” Rhoda repeated, more a prayer to God than a question to her departed sister.
God was the One who spoke in whispers to the soul, not the dead. But whenever Rhoda heard a murmuring in her mind, it was Emma’s voice. It had been that way since the day Emma died.
The sound of two people talking near the road caught Rhoda’s attention. Surely
they
were real. She rose out of her crouch, pressing her bare feet into the rich soil, and went in the direction of the voices, passing the long rows of strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries and her trellises of raspberries and Concord grapes. Heady scents rode on the spring air, not just from the ripening fruits, but from her bountiful herb garden that yielded rosemary, sage, scarlet bergamot, and dozens of other plants she’d spent years cultivating. Dusting her
palms together, she skirted the raised boxes that held the herbs and peered through a honeysuckle bush.