Beloved Readers,
Another fall has arrived. My family has seen lots of changes with this new school year. How about yours?
Our oldest son helped his wife pack and move three hours away. She’s in pharmacy school at the University of Georgia, and the program she’s in requires
more than half of the pharmacy students to move to another location in their third and fourth years. A lottery system decides who is relocated. Because of policy
changes at UGA, this “must move” news came as a surprise for us. But our son and his wife will take turns visiting each other on the weekends.
Our second son is changing work locations every few weeks as part of his internship as a pharmacist. Not only is he paying a lot of money to work for free, he’s witnessing hardships among mankind that are disturbing and taxing—from emergency rooms to psychiatric wards. He
consoles himself that there is a light at the end of what’s been a very long tunnel. But this tenderhearted young man is struggling with the massive needs of people
who are often turned away. It doesn’t matter to him if it’s a drug addict seeking pain pills; these are God’s children, and it hurts to see them suffer.
Our youngest graduated high school and is currently living in Manhattan, where he is attending school, fulfilling a dream, and sometimes catching the
wrong subway. As much as I longed to live in Georgia while I was growing up in other states, he has always wanted to live elsewhere, preferably a big city like
Manhattan or Los Angeles.
I’ve been parenting for almost three decades, and each time autumn rolls around, I experience a fresh round of changes and challenges.
Thankfully, wherever we are in our life’s journey—whether young, old, or in between—God has given us gifts and strengths to help us live as fruitfully as
we can: loving, giving, and sometimes simply surviving. Where our gifts and strengths fail, God has given us others we can turn to—family, health-care providers,
teachers, and clergy, to mention a few.
Some gifts are easy to spot. Others are quiet and hidden. Some gifts shine from young childhood. Others are so quiet they ease out of hiding only when a
person is old. Gifts can be hidden for many long seasons, especially if we don’t believe we’re worthy of having even the slightest gift.
It seems that we can spend a lifetime discovering our strengths, yet we are easily able to catch a glimpse of them in a stranger or in someone we’ve just met.
Gifts, ours and others’, are given to us so we can fight the good fight. Regardless of what we’re fighting for or against, God has given us special strengths to face
the challenges.
But what if your gift, the one thing God gave you to help fight the good fight, isn’t one people are comfortable with?
This is the journey for Rhoda Byler in book one of Amish Vines and Orchards, A Season for Tending.
Come, take a moment to catch a glimpse of Rhoda’s gifts and struggles.
Cindy’s website has a new look!
I'd like to invite you to drop by my redesigned website and see
the new look. I absolutely love it! Come take a tour, check out my blog, and leave a comment to let me know what you think.
www.cindywoodsmall.com.
Or, to read the latest blog posts, click here.
On sale now!
Rhoda’s thoughts before the beginning of her story in A Season for Tending ~
I long to cultivate relationships with the same care and tenderness that I give to my beloved garden.
When I crawl into bed at night, longing to shut out my reality for just a little while, foggy images of things no one else knows press in.
I used to ask God: why me? But while growing up, I came to realize that no one gets to choose who they are. The best we can do is yield our weakest and
strongest selves to the God who loves us at our worst and calls us to be our best.
Still, I struggle with who I am, as do those who love me.
I don’t remember my first forewarning. My Daed says it happened before I turned five. He said we were in a horse-drawn carriage, running an errand and enjoying the
splendor of fall. As he drove past a row of unfamiliar homes, I remarked that I didn’t know there was such a thing as a bad mommy. And then I pointed to a specific
house.
Daed hadn't known who lived there, and he'd thought my remarks were simply the nonsensical prattling of a child—until he learned otherwise.
Since then, he's faithfully admonished me, saying my intuition must be tempered and managed through obedience to God and prayer.
I've tried. I'd even kneel before God as my witness about that. And if I could give this gift to someone else, I would—to someone wiser. Someone with a better
understanding of what God wants. I never seem to know what He expects from me. But whatever it is, I believe I get it wrong far more than I get it right.
And today…if it wasn’t for my fruit and herb garden, I might feel too lonely to take my next breath. But I take refuge in the midst of my garden, and despite what goes
on around me, that’s a comfort I’ll never take for granted.
Read the
first chapter here.
Cindy's Itinerary
Thursday, September 20 through Sunday, September 23,
2012
American Christian Fiction Writers Conference 2012
Teaching Basic Fiction Techniques
Website: www.acfw.com/conference
~
Saturday, November 10 through Sunday, November 11, 2012
Dahlonega Literary Festival
Stewart Continuing Education Building
North Georgia College and State University
82 College Circle
Dahlonega, GA 30597
Website: http://dahlonegaliteraryfestival.wordpress.com/
The Apple Orchard Connection
The start of
my new series: Amish Vines and Orchards
The title of the new series is Amish Vines and Orchards, and I was deeply moved while doing research for book one: A Season for Tending. Along the way, I
learned fascinating histories from both the English and Amish that navigated this story. You’ll travel some of the same paths I did as I learned about Rhoda’s life.
But another aspect to this story is the care and tending of an apple orchard.
Apple orchards are a large part of the Woodsmall family history. 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.
Years 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.
Amish Connection
The Amish do not wear any jewelry, including wedding rings. So
how do you know if a man or woman is married? Learn the answer to that question in the video below.
Apple Dumplings
A Taste of Pinecraft cookbook (page 298)
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon Crisco
1 Tablespoon butter
7/8 cup milk (or 1 cup scant)
2/3 cup brown sugar
3 chopped apples
1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
Mix flour, baking powder, and salt. Work shortening into flour mixture. Add
milk. Roll out dough 1/4 inch thick. Spread soft or melted butter on the top side of the dough. Cover dough with brown sugar, cinnamon, and apples. Roll up starting
with one long side of the dough, rolling brown sugar, cinnamon, and apples into a spiral or jelly roll shape. Cut into slices 1 1/2 inches thick.
Sauce:
1 Tablespoon flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup hot water
1 1/2 cinnamon
Mix flour, sugar, and salt. Add hot water and cinnamon and boil 3 minutes.
Pour over dumplings. Bake at 375 degrees for 35-45 minutes. Serve with milk or whipped cream.
An
exclusive chance to stay in an Amish household and experience their way of life for you and a friend!
You've stepped into Amish country through the
pages of my books and blog posts, but...
what if I could help you to really enter Amish life?
To learn more and to enter, click here.
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