Anna clutched the small glass to her chest as if it were a priceless diamond. Silas Murdoch, the shopkeeper, looked at her with a mixture of pity and greed. To him, Anna was just a widow in name only (though technically abandoned) who would soon sell her land for a pittance when hunger began to bite. “Twenty dollars is a lot of money for someone who has nothing, Anna,” he insisted, resting his fat hands on the counter.

But Anna didn’t listen. She didn’t see “anything.” She saw the 160 acres of prairie as her only chance at freedom. If she went back east, she would end up cleaning floors in a factory or forced into marriage with some man who would treat her like property. No. She would rather fight the land than fight the will of men.

He left the store with his glass and a small sack of flour. He had exactly fifty-eight cents left. His two-dollar investment in tools and that small piece of glass were all that stood between life and death.

As she reached her land again, the wind began to whistle differently. It was a sharp whistle, like the sound of a stalking animal. Winter wasn’t just near; it was breathing down her neck. Anna looked at the hole she had dug in the earth. It looked like a grave. But she promised herself it would be a womb, a place where her family would be reborn.

The Battle Against the Earth
The following days were a descent into the brutality of physical labor. Without a draft horse to pull a plow, Anna had to use a hand shovel to cut through the blocks of turf. Each block of prairie soil, known as “Nebraska marble,” was a dense mass of intertwined grass roots that had grown for centuries. They were heavy, damp, and stubborn.

Every morning, Anna woke up with her body screaming. Her hands were so swollen that she couldn’t make fists at first. She had to plunge them into the icy water of the stream to awaken her nerves and then wrap them in old rags so she could hold the shovel.

Fritz, at just six years old, became a little man. His task was to collect buffalo “chips”—dried dung—to use as fuel in the iron stove that his husband had left behind because it was too heavy to carry. Greta, the little girl, played at “cleaning” the blocks of earth, removing the excess roots with a dull kitchen knife.

Building the walls was agonizing. To ensure the structure’s stability, Anna designed walls nearly a meter thick at the base. She placed the blocks with their roots facing upwards, so that as they grew even slightly, they would intertwine with the upper layer, creating a wall as solid as concrete. But as the wall rose, the effort doubled. She had to lift those twenty-kilo blocks overhead.

One afternoon, while trying to place a block in the top corner, exhaustion overcame her. Her legs buckled, and the heavy clump of earth fell onto her shoulder, knocking her to the ground. She lay there, staring up at the vast sky, tasting the dust in her mouth. For a moment, she thought of Hinrich Folkmeer. She thought of Silas Murdoch. “They’re right,” she told herself. “I’m a fool. I can’t do this alone.”

But then she felt a small hand on her cheek. It was Greta.
“Mommy, are you playing at sleeping in the dirt?” the little girl asked innocently.
Anna saw her daughter’s eyes, filled with absolute trust. Greta wasn’t afraid because she believed her mother was invincible. Anna swallowed her tears, stood up, and lifted the block again. That night, the walls reached their final height.

The roof: The biggest challenge.
The earthen walls were secure, but without a roof, it was just a corral. The problem on the prairie was that there were no trees. The nearby stream only had spindly willows that wouldn’t support the weight of the thatch for the roof. Anna needed rafters.

He remembered seeing an old, abandoned barn about five kilometers away, on a concession that had failed the year before. He knew he couldn’t legally touch it, but the hunger for survival is stronger than property law.

For Complete Cooking STEPS Please Head On Over To Next Page Or Open button (>) and don’t forget to SHARE with your Facebook friends.