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Show 34 was not most speedy," she later said. How did she feel about the enforced separation? This was not a great surprise, but still it brought us dreads and fears...we were then so poor in worldly means. ..[yet] we were indeed most anxious to do all in our power to make ourselves self-sustaining that we-could do our part for a cause we loved and honored.28 Thanks to her "wise mother's early training when every day, before I went to play I'd sew my seams and knit my rounds," Ellis employed her sewing skills to create embroadered flannel gowns for the expected babies of other women. In addition to a fruit orchard, her father had given her, at marriage, a cow. So she milked her cow and "churned the butter and garnered fruits of bearing trees," all the while blessing her father for his generosity. In that first autumn of Milford's absence, Ellis took her two little boys to visit their great grandparents in Pleasant Grove, "traversing the 40 miles in a lumber wagon over steep and unpaved roads." While gathering the fruits from her orchard, she did not presume upon her aging grandparents for her children's care but took them with her each day to play together under the trees and "have their naps on an improvised pallet on the fallen leaves covered with a soft quilt" while she climbed the trees for apples and peaches, "saving the best to preserve in bottles, the others to pare and dry." The result of her arduous work was "numerous" sacks of fruit and "beautiful-looking" glass jars. This bottled fruit, pre-dating the sugar-preserved style, was "inspissated," cooked down to a |
