SEPTEMBER 1-1

id="toc_marker-12" class="Chapter">SEPTEMBER 1

Dearest Ice Sweet,

It’s funny. By the time you’re reading this, I’ll have been dead for most of a year. Time is a strange thing. Life speeds up and slows down—maddeningly slowly when there is pain and sorrow. And it’s a blur through the good times. It should be the other way around.

With your mother gone, I thought my life was over. Knowles Valley Vines was lost, and both parents-in-law and my wife were gone. Yet those years were so busy that they’d be hard to remember if they also hadn’t been so full. The daughter I’d left in my wife’s care needed a father.

I’d thought about moving, you were young enough, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. But where? There had been so much heartbreak in the California soil, that I couldn’t drag you or myself ……