Sunlight and Shade Chapter One April 1887

Ellen rose from her straw pallet, and scratched herself, Lord she hated sleeping on hay, but it was Joseph’s day off and her turn to water the horses, then she could go back to her soft feather bed for a few hours. Her father would be wanting the horses hitched up to his wagon before sunrise, so she had better get busy.

Splashing her face with water from the well, she filled the heavy wooden buckets and put them on the wheel barrow. The two small cart horses were happy to see her, stomping and whinnying their welcome. She rubbed Robin’s soft nose, right between his nostrils where he liked it. He had a lovely soft nose, and huffed in her face as she petted him. Her father didn’t like her petting the horses, he thought it would make them soft, “they are working cart horses, Ellen, not pampered pets”, he would gruffly snort at her if he caught her. Much like the way he treated his sons, she thought, and not much better for the girls. They were all working creatures to her father. With 12 mouths to feed he couldn’t afford any lazy children or animals; but he wasn’t up yet, so she gave her favorites some bread crusts she had stolen from the kitchen, and petted them both. The only bit of ease they would have all day.

Hitching them up to her father’s delivery wagon she spied her mother in the bakery packing up the loaves. She knew her mother had already been up for hours, baking the fresh bread that had risen overnight in the cool pantry. Her mother was hard working too, but at least there her father showed some softness. Maria Blackgrove was the light of his life, and they had 10 children to prove it!

Just then she heard her father coming and scurried out of sight, if he saw that she had done her chores without getting dressed he would be angry, and she didn’t feel like a scolding this morning. It was why she had slept in the barn, so he wouldn’t hear her getting up. She hoped he assumed she had been up with her mother, as the oldest girl she was her mother’s helper, and at 14 expected to behave like a woman, not a young girl.