PROLOGUE
A small town in the North American prairie . . .
Bountiful lay in a curve of green mantle under the pink gold of dawn. Soft light moved slowly on the broadsides of its homes and stores and played among the trees that lined the streets. Inhabitants cuddled under quilts or shivered in feathered down on a high tree limb or snuggled under a copse of trees in mist-cloaked meadows at its boundaries.
Every dawn was a hushed moment—the briefest pause when earth holds her breath. Then, the day began again as it had since the prairieland had formed. Its people were latecomers, a noisy lot, the birds had long ago concluded. The cattle grazed and watched without comment—a very dignified way of being.
The people of Bountiful were practical folks who lived life by accepting its limitations as well as its potential, planning for all its contingencies, working hard, praying hard, and trying to not take any of it too seriously. Life had been generally good to the people and creatures of Bountiful which went a long way toward explaining why they were so happy, in the main. Yet, this general feeling of wellness might have a subtle formula: early settlers made structures close to one another in grids and circles that articulated meaningfully, keeping families, quite streets, green lawns and gardens safe. It was the custom to give thanks for a land of plenty understanding that certain ways brought order and predictable outcomes. It was a town that retained its youth by raising them to love it. Most returned to Bountiful after college or brief forays into other places. It was just a good place to live and love. In the more complex world around it, Bountiful remained predictable and renewable like the dark soil of its farms. Stretching in ordered rows that hugged the contours of the landform, Bountiful farms yielded good harvests of wheat and corn, and vegetables for local markets. Well-tended farm animals produced excellent grade meat, milk, and eggs. After two-hundred years of existence, Bountiful remained the same kind of place—undisturbed and self-generating.
TIME BEFORE
A sweeping vista of tall grasses higher than any man, the whole of it moved in slow undulations on the breeze, no shade crossing its shoulders. Bright golden green halo giving way to sky—blue dome, white cloud—floating. Above the tall grass stems swirls of yellow blossoms followed the sun on its path across the heavens. Crimson and cerulean wildflowers like shooting stars painted the tall grass prairie on God’s vast canvas. Bees and birds dined and swooped in and out of the movable feast. Into the dark soil the grasses plunged and held in mats and networks thirty feet to bedrock. In the cool, subterranean kingdom the microscopic inhabitants of the soil shared or stored minerals, energy, and water—a prairie dynamo.
In late summer, a strike of lightening ignites the sea of dry grass. Flames burst and rush across it consuming the air unbound. Inferno envelops and burns to the ground all that waved before. Later, seed coats burst open onto enriched soils, rains pour, and the prairie regenerates. Fire is the prairie flower of the gods who reigned over the land where Bountiful now lies.
AND THEN
The people who came to live and to know the prairie came by it in hardship and fear. Surrounded in flames and smoke, huddled in sod huts, shivering in cold or sweltering in heat, they held like the roots of the grasses, held fast in fortitude under the blue dome. They dug and clawed away the grasses that held the land not understanding it but prevailing above it with plow and horse. They laid their furrows in soil so black it swallowed the seed into its abyss. From the seed emerged green shooting stalks and leaves that pushed a flood of kernels into being, golden kernels that moved the dynamo from under the land into the crop of man. The cycle continues. So powerfully wrought, the ghost prairie gave its wealth for centuries even as it renewed itself.
Bountiful lay upon this powered land with only a faint memory from a pioneering past. Few understood what had been before the coming of the Europeans who created the town, mapping streets, dreaming a dream that belonged to a distant land.
It came to pass that a prairie girl would leave Bountiful to become a writer in the distant metropolis of New York City. Her return to her homeland would be prolonged by a successful career and a late marriage. Only upon the passing of her dear husband did she decide to return. It had not been a conscious decision, but the pull of an ebbing tide that swept her back to her origin.
Her family’s farm had been the center of her world as a child and youth. Now, it held an unexamined power over her. Compulsion, yes, that was how it felt to Charlotte, like she had no control over the surprising decisions her city friends could not fathom. An ad in the New York Times, the sale of her gorgeous townhouse on the upper East Side of Manhattan and leaving art and culture for the agrarian life of a senior community at Green Fields Farm. Was it self-destructive? A compulsion spawned by grief?
“Not at all,” Charlotte had said to her friends. “Somehow it feels natural to return to quiet and openness of Bountiful. It just feels right.”
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