The Awakening: My Continuining Journey To Love

A gentle breeze stirred the grasses on the flat, rich farmland of the fifteen hundred acres of the Caulden Ranch. The leaves on the fruit and nut trees moved; there were peaches, figs, walnuts and almonds. Cornstalks dried in the scorching heat. As usual, it hadn't rained a drop in two months now and everyone in the Kingman area was hoping the rains would hold off another few weeks until the hops were in.

The hops, the major crop of the Caulden Ranch, were close to peak ripeness, hanging off fifteen-foot-tall poles, beginning to turn yellow and bursting with their wet succulence. In another few weeks the pickers would arrive and the hop vines would be torn from their strings and taken to the kilns to dry.

It was very early morning, with the many permanent farm workers just beginning to rise and start about their chores. Already, the day was hot and most of the workers would be in the fields, long flat acres with no relief from the sun. Some luckier workers would be spending the day in the shaded hop fields, the vines overhead forming a canopy of shelter from the blazing sun.

Through the middle of the ranch ran a well-used dirt road with other roads branching off it, all roads leading past enormous barns, barracks for the workers and the huge, chimneyed hop kilns.

In the middle of the ranch, facing north, stood the big Caulden house, constructed of local red brick, with a painted white verandah around two sides, balconies protruding from the second story. Tall palm trees and an old magnolia sheltered the house from the sun and kept the darkened interior cool.

Inside, in the west bedroom on the second floor, Amanda Caulden was still sleeping, her thick chestnut hair pulled back into a respectable braid. Her sedate, characterless nightgown was buttoned to her chin, the cuffs carefully covering her wrists. She lay on her back, the sheet folded perfectly across her breasts, her hands clasped across her rib cage. The bedclothes were only barely disturbed, the bed looked as if it had just been turned down -- yet a twenty-two-year-old woman had spent the night here.

The room was as tidy as the bed. Apart from the young woman lying so utterly still, there were very few signs of life. There was the bed, expensive and of good quality -- as was the woman -- and two chairs, a table here and there, a closet door, curtains on the three windows. There were no lace doilies on the tables, no prizes won by a male admirer at a fair, no satin dancing slipper hastily kicked under the bed. There was no powder on the dresser, no hairpins left out. Inside the drawers and the closet, everything was perfectly neat. There were no dresses shoved to the back that had been bought on the spur of the moment then never worn. There were eighteen books in a case under one window, all leather bound, all of great intellectual importance. There were no novels about some pretty young thing's seduction by some handsome young thing.