At Home - Sunday, Nov. 1st '96
Later
Dear ones,
Was down yesterday and mailed the one letter to you which you will get a day or two before you do this, but this is to let you know that if we do not arrive there on next Sat’y, will be because that our car will have to go via El Paso, Texas, on the So. Pacific, instead of going via the __________________, Topeka & Santa Fe, the more direct rout. Consequently, it may take us some hours longer, but we are bound to start on next Tuesday eve, about 6 o’clock. And they say that that train goes as above indicated.
We received your good letter of the 26, containing just the information we have been waiting or looking for and it’s good and will help us ever so much in deciding what to carry besides other items of importance, and of interest, especially your talk regarding the Sorgo outlook. Guess we’ll get a living somehow.
We laughed to see how you were dazed by the hopes of our coming to Cal. and could hardly believe your sences. Well, we don’t blame you, for so it seems to us, that tis more like a fairy dream, than a solid reality. Nevertheless, it is a grand fact and dread which you heretofore entertained, fearing that the next letter that you would get would knock all your hopes into a "___________" is all dispeled ere this reaches you.
I told Mr Davison, our buyer, that I was surprised that a man would come along with the cash to buy our farm during these especially hard times. But so it was. Mother has said many times in the past that we would never sell and had lost all hope, but hope has ever been alive in my breast. God is good to open the door of our deliverance so wide. Now we can go and feed in the ever green pasturs, far off in the sunset land of everlasting summer. "Where no winter our footsteps can wrong. But where flowers are blossoming all the year long. Where the shade of the Palm tree may be over our home and the Lemon and the Orange are white in their bloom. All of which are fine but we ne’er forget that the same hand that planted so lavishly all of these beauties, also planted the "briars & thorns" that was promised poor, fallen, father Adam. Just after the creation of this mundane sphere. And I found those thorns among the roses & the flowers of California as we have by the sky tinted waters of Minnesota, only of a different kind.
A little "Skift" of snow came night before last, only just so as to give us a reminder of what is to be, ere long, the lot of the belated dennizens of this hyperborean region of the Northwest.
And, Oh, it makes us all so thankful that now, just at the approach of another hard winter, that we are to leave it all, all behind us forever.
I dislike to leave all of the great multitude of friends and acquaintances that have formed about us for these over 30 years past, but, but, but, you know after all, each and every one of them are living for themselves, not much for us. And it leads us to look up to that One who ever lives, and interseeds for us. "A Friend who sticketh closer than a brother" and He is as near to us in Cal. as here.
Well, we’ll see you next week "if", and we will then talk it all over together, and so adieu.