At the turn of the nineteenth century a broad mix of nationalities had intermingled within the United States, creating a nation of cultures that were unique. Sometimes the mixtures created personalities that exhibited indifference, coupled with the hardness of granite. Due to the hardships encountered in an unforgiving environment, harshness of personality became common. Especially on farms where families were intentionally large in order to insure that there would be enough hands within the household to handle the work involved in tilling the soil and harvesting the crops the fields...

Life isn't the bright future Maggie imagined when she married Justin Bailey on the spur of the moment three years before. His lack of integrity and ambition, and his frequent infidelities and physical abuse make the marriage impossible. When Maggie follows her friend's suggestion and she move onto her friend's widowed brother's ranch to work as his cook and housekeeper, Justin tracks her down there. When he shows up at the ranch requesting Maggie give him money to feed the monkey on his back, he causes her to fall down the stairs and she delivers their second child, the culmination of...

When Tracy is sent to stay with her aunt on a ranch in Northern Arizona, she has no idea what is in store for her. Being a city girl who has never been in the country, much less in the woods, the entire time on the ranch becomes an adventure, beginning with her introduction to Mischief.

While her father is away tending Grandfather's business, Maizie discovers she has amazing abilities after the surprise meeting of a Faery named Puddles. The Faery magically appears when Maizie makes a wish while huddled inside the woodbox with her brother Timmy, being punished for an imagined infraction of the rules set forth by their unreasonable stepmother Rhotundra.

Horror inhabits the neighbor's attic, and Rachael is about to experience it first hand. It is only by the intervention of a young man who appears to be a part of the horror that she and her offspring survive the butchering her neighbor has in store for her. This is a suspenseful tale of survival at the hands of an evil that lurks in the shadows, waiting to pounce. An evil that portrays itself as innocence.

When Timmy Chick finds something shiny lying on the ground of the farmyard, he learns a valuable life lesson; that all things are in the eye of the beholder. It also gave new meaning to the old adage that one man's trash is another man's treasure.

Maggie's life has been filled with adventure and adversity, from nearly losing her husband to a cougar attack, to her hunting the cat down on the desert and killing it. Faced with an empty nest and besieged at an early age in her middle fifties by near blindness, the effects of cataracts, life's surprises aren't finished with her yet. When she tragically witnesses the accident that claims her husband's life, she is drawn into a self-protective state of hysterical amnesia. When Maggie regains her memory and returns to the ranch in the Arizona desert, she brings the homeless woman who took her...

In the 1880s the United States Government expanded their idea of civilizing the Indians through forcefully removing Indian children and placing them in Indian boarding schools throughout the west, where they intended to educate the children in Christianity and the white man's way. In 1887 the government built a boarding school in Keams Canyon Arizona and they began removing Hopi and Navajo children from their homes, sending them away from their families and placing them in the newly built boarding school. In 1938 Joaquin Neilsen, a young half breed orphaned Hopi boy that his Hopi grandmother...

Between the covers of this book one will find a collection of philosophical thoughts, poems, and prose. They're sort of like the collection of debris found in a bird's nest before being scattered by life's seasonal, proverbial storm. It's always amazing what can be found in a bird's nest that the creature has gathered in the pursuit of feathering her temporary abode. So are the ramblings of this woman that some might label as unbalanced, as intense and ludicrous as those thoughts may prove to be.

Sometimes we are interested only in a brief read, something short and to the point. This book contains a collection of short stories that might stand on their own, stories that merely serve to entertain for the moment. Nothing elaborate or long winded, merely quips that are here one moment and then gone the next, something to merely whet the appetite.