She Found Blueberries and Blackberries Everywhere… Then Built a Business

Part 1
The wagon was already shrinking into the Wyoming distance when the young woman finally stopped watching it.

She did not run after it.

She did not shout.

There was nothing left to say to the family who had employed her since February, and even if there had been, the dry summer wind would have carried her words nowhere useful.

So she stood in the road beneath the late-July sun and listened to the wheels creak farther away until the sound disappeared.

In one hand she held a canvas trunk whose latch had broken months earlier and was now secured with wire. Inside were two dresses, a wool blanket, a few pieces of worn clothing, and almost nothing she could sell.

In her pocket were eleven coins.

She had counted them twice.

Less than a dollar and a half.

Behind her stood the empty rented house the family had stripped before leaving. No curtains remained at the windows. No cooking pots hung in the kitchen. No chair waited beside the wall.

Ahead lay Berry Creek.

She was twenty-two years old, homeless, nearly broke, and six or eight weeks away from the first hard cold.

She lifted the trunk.

Then she walked.

Berry Creek was hardly large enough to deserve the word town. A general store faced the main road. Nearby stood a boarding house, a livery stable, a feed supplier, a church still waiting for a proper steeple, and a scattering of raw-timber buildings whose owners had constructed them as though determination alone could make the place permanent.

She knew a few people by sight.

A shopkeeper who had once sold her thread.

A woman who had nodded to her outside the milliner’s.

A man at the feed supply.

They were acquaintances in the loosest sense. Nobody she could reasonably ask for a bed. Nobody waiting for her.

She put her trunk beside a bench outside the livery and sat.

Fear came first.

She let it come.

Then she did what her mother had taught her years before: instead of staring directly at the fear, she examined the edges of the problem.

What did she actually have?

Her hands.

A knife.

A blanket.

Eleven coins.

Several weeks of summer.