Hearts Awakening (41 page)
Ellie held him close, the scorched wedding band pressed tight between them. “What was it you were going to say to her?”
“That I had made the mistake of marrying Rebecca when I was still in love with another woman, and if I married her, I’d only be making the same mistake twice. Sound familiar?” he asked, reminding her of the very words she had spoken to him just hours ago.
He set her back and held out the legal papers he had been carrying. “Now, unless you have any objections, I’d like to take these inside and burn them so we can begin our lives together again, truly as one.”
She laughed and cried at the same time. “No, I don’t,” she managed as her very soul began to sing with joy and gratitude. “It sounds wonderful and miraculous and—”
But before she could continue, Jackson silenced her litany with a kiss that held all the wonder of the married love they would share together.
There are a fair number of islands in the Susquehanna River as it courses through the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, eventually emptying into the Atlantic Ocean. Some islands are as small as three acres, while others contain nearly one thousand.
Historically, Native Americans used many of these islands during milder months as meeting places to trade or to enjoy the area’s natural bounty. Later, settlers moving west claimed these islands. On at least one, there are records of a homestead; on others, there are accounts of settlers living there only for brief periods of time.
During the twentieth century, government and government-sponsored organizations, as well as other philanthropic groups, began to acquire these islands to preserve them as ecological treasures or to create recreational centers. Some islands remain uninhabited by humans or are now protected sites for wildlife to use for nesting. City Island in Harrisburg, on the other hand, is now home to a sixty-three-acre recreational park. The Susquehanna River Trail Association also oversees a fifty-one-mile river trail that runs from Sunbury to Harrisburg and provides day access to twenty islands.
Dillon’s Island, however, is purely fictional. There are also no historical records to indicate that anyone ever established commercial orchards on any of the islands, either, although there were orchards on some of the islands, as well as the nearby mainland in the nineteenth century.
Today, the area around Biglerville, Pennsylvania, is an apple lover’s dream-come-true. Home to the National Apple Museum, the area is also home to growers who tend thousands of acres of apple orchards. Several major producers of apple juice and applesauce have built their plants nearby, as well.
Technology has changed a great deal since the nineteenth century, too. For women who lived in the nineteenth century, the change from cooking on an open hearth to cookstoves was not always an easy one. Priscilla J. Brewer has documented the change in cooking technology in her scholarly book,
From Fireplace to Cookstove: Technology and the Domestic Ideal in America,
and I relied on her work a great deal. Ellie’s trouble with cleaning the stovepipe, for example, is based on a diary entry made by a Connecticut woman in the 1830s.
A quick search of Internet sites can provide interested readers with all sorts of information about Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River islands as well as the apple industry and antique cooking stoves. I invite you all to explore them, as your interests lead you.
I also ask you all for your indulgence as I created my fictional island home for the story I have shared with you.
Hearts Awakening
is, above all, a story of faith and hope and love and His precious gifts to all of us.
Delia Parr