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Show 97 she has a "melancholy" disposition. She believes that sorrow and bereavement have been heavy contributors ("my heart breaks down," she says, "beneath a burden that some would carry with ease."), but she can think of no one with whom she would change places. Hindsight and a family group sheet in the genealogical library infer that though she may not know it, she is newly pregnant. Whatever her malaise has been through the months since Anna's passing, she now has an added reason to be feeling under par. "Milford and the folks" come again on the last day of 1873 with a plan to remain south for the winter. How the Reynolds clan (Ellis's father's two families), is able, in its impoverished condition, to sustain these frequent and protracted visits from Milford and his three other wives and Maggie's four-year-old Walter, in addition to Ellis and her two boys, is not delineated. There are two houses; but food alone for Reynolds' two families, plus all these others, could become a problem. Home food production may hold the solution. Even today, people in the rural communities of Utah who otherwise don't have a nickel can eat rather lavishly, compared to city dwellers with similar monetary resources. The early-January kaleidoscopic changes in Ellis's frame of mind, as Milford leaves and returns, provide alternating light and shade in quick sequence until Ellis is impelled to some sort of action that will produce a significant change in her life. She begins again working to the plan of early-morning study, which she initiated several years earlier, following Willie's death. |