This page is dedicated To Blinny Platt. As I think of things she might say or do I will add them. I know that she is now a peace in her house.
From freeimages.co.uk.
This morning sun appears brazen like the one Blinny shaded her eyes from the day of the fire. Study it for a moment and it does make ones eye hurt. Think a moment of how the little girl felt.
From freeimages.co.uk.
This reminds me of the softer blush
on the clouds that I envisioned
while writing that scene.
on the clouds that I envisioned
while writing that scene.
When I first mulled over whether my mother's story would make a novel, I didn't know. Would losing your baby brother when fire consumed the family homestead house, followed in a few weeks by her mother dying and then sent by train across the Rocky Mountains to live with her two uncles and her grandmother be enough? It was a question that stayed in my mind as I wrote five other novels. The thought never left. Harbored Secrets developed from there. It is totally fiction, but has its basis in fact. The following pictures helped me to visualize where my folks were raise. The prairie was part of their lives even after they left to live in a valley in western Montana. They kept it alive with stories and visits to the family homesteads.
This homestead belonged to my Great Grandmother. It was located near the Canadian border north of Rudyard. Blinny may have lived in one very similar.
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Below is a picture of my father on a farm tractor like Blinny would have had to learn to drive. My mother did learn to drive one when she was eleven and helped her father with harvesting
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In the second picture notice the McComick-Deering sign on the combine.
The combine that Blinny feared. |
This is a sampling of what a grassland prairie looks like. There is nothing quite like it. When you stand in the wind and search through the grasses all kinds of life are feeding off the richness of the grasses and soil. Just like humans do. We feed on what we know and we nourish on what is familiar. Jot me a note and tell me what is growing in your surroundings.
My Granddaughter has chosen to live in the prairie country of Montana. This is a creek near her place. I show it so the reader can see there is beauty and stability in the grasslands. Blinny built her house near one such creek and built the gazebo for Odette on its banks.
On the back of this photo, my mother wrote that these were my parents first gourds. I don't know if they are pumpkins, but it is how I came up with the idea for Didier to want to grow pumpkins for a cash crop.
The following is a recent review of Harbored Secrets. It is so well written and has a good understanding of my plot. I wanted to share it and to thank the reader.....
Marie Martin creates believable characters and heartrending dialogue throughout
Harbored Secrets.
It's a story that cries out with the message that
"love is an action verb."
Blanche, or Blinny, as she is known to those
closest to her, is only eight years old when the story opens. She is called
upon to perform an adult's role in driving the combine tractor on her father's
wheat farm. Within the first few chapters, we learn that this is only the
dandelion-top of a weed that grows deep, deep throughout this girl's childhood.
She is forced, through circumstance of adult neglect, to deliver her baby
brother and cut the umbilical cord. She is given utter and unfair
responsibility for the care and rearing of a willful younger sister, for the
most part three years old, then ten, then fifty.
Unloved, uncared for,
unable to do a damn thing about it, the adult Blanche builds her house, brick
upon brick, trying to come to grips with the secrets uncovered throughout the
years. There are two, three, maybe four moments when this child/woman has felt
real love, and those instances haunt an otherwise plodding, often horrible,
existence. This book is hard to shake.
Harbored Secrets.
It's a story that cries out with the message that
"love is an action verb."
Blanche, or Blinny, as she is known to those
closest to her, is only eight years old when the story opens. She is called
upon to perform an adult's role in driving the combine tractor on her father's
wheat farm. Within the first few chapters, we learn that this is only the
dandelion-top of a weed that grows deep, deep throughout this girl's childhood.
She is forced, through circumstance of adult neglect, to deliver her baby
brother and cut the umbilical cord. She is given utter and unfair
responsibility for the care and rearing of a willful younger sister, for the
most part three years old, then ten, then fifty.
Unloved, uncared for,
unable to do a damn thing about it, the adult Blanche builds her house, brick
upon brick, trying to come to grips with the secrets uncovered throughout the
years. There are two, three, maybe four moments when this child/woman has felt
real love, and those instances haunt an otherwise plodding, often horrible,
existence. This book is hard to shake.
This is another of Mom's old pictures of the homestead on the prairies near Goldstone, MT. The township of Goldstone is now gone. So are the barn and horses. What is left, are the stories that Mom told and that I hold in my heart. Could this have been a barn with a snake box in the loft? Only my imaginative character, Blinny, knows.
At one point in Blinny's daily battles with Odette, I describe Odette's troubled eyes as ripples in a stock pond. This is similar to what I envisioned. I used a stock pond as the analogy because they fight to just stay alive and not be sucked away into dry soil. I was giving permission to download this photo from Flickr by Yakkhapadma.
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Wheat for 40 cents
By William Yeats Oh, please tell me how the farmers in Montana Can ever pay their taxes and the Rents, And keep their poor old trucks and tractors running, When they have to sell their wheat for forty cents? For at that price you cannot make expenses, And keep your equipment up in shape, When you know its worth at least six-bits to raise it, You can’t help that you’re Just an ape. Now the tractor needs a set of sleeves and pistons. For the way it is pumping oil near breaks my heart. And I’ve cranked and cracked, till my poor back is broken, Trying to get that cussed thing to start. The timing gears are rattling and banging. The old crankshaft is getting mighty flat, The radiator leaks like a spraying fountain And nothing that I do seems to help that. Twas many moons ago it shed the skidrims, The broken worn out lugs have lost their grip. And every time the plow hooks on a boulder, The tractor stands still while the blutch does slip. And the old truck isn’t faring any better. To tell the truth, its nothing but a wreck. And some day, crossing the O’brien coulee, I’ll have to spill and break my dog gone neck. When in the rattletrap I go ariding, I thank the Lord, my heart is good and stout As in the cab I sit with nerves aquiver A listening for the rear tires to blow out. Yes, it sure is great to be an honest farmer A horny-handed tiller of the soil, But right now, I’d pass for a first class scare-crow, All smeared from head to toe with grease and oil. Didn’t dare to go to church on Easter, For through my shoes the folks could see my toes. Indeed there’s very little joy in living, When you’re wearing gunny sacks for undercoths They say, of everything there is surplus, Just what to do with it nobody knows. Now really, if there’s such an awful surplus, Why can’t I have a suit of Sunday Clothes. Oh, I’m sure if people only had the money, There’d be an awful jam in every store. They’d soon clean up that over-rated surplus, And have them jumping round, a rustling more. |
The idea to have Blinny's father, Didier write poems came from my grandfather writing poems in the late 1930s, when he was alone on the homestead after my grandmother died. He had taken mom and her sister to the Flathead to live with his mother. It helped him wile away the evening hours. Grandpa Yeats was published in the Havre, MT newspaper. I chose this one to share because it portrays some of the difficulty the homesteaders had.
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5.0 out
of 5 stars This author was born to write., May 16, 2014
By Yvonne Bechtold
This review is from: Harbored Secrets (A Psychological Mystery) (Kindle Edition)
By the end of the very first paragraph, I knew Marie F. Martin had written a book I would have a hard time putting down. In between high drama, there is a love letter to Montana, and she uses her love of the English language throughout. More "Oh wow" moments in this book than any other I have ever read in my more than half a century of life.
By Yvonne Bechtold
This review is from: Harbored Secrets (A Psychological Mystery) (Kindle Edition)
By the end of the very first paragraph, I knew Marie F. Martin had written a book I would have a hard time putting down. In between high drama, there is a love letter to Montana, and she uses her love of the English language throughout. More "Oh wow" moments in this book than any other I have ever read in my more than half a century of life.