Sitting in the rocker on the cabin's porch, Sunny watched her husband and ten year old adopted twins playing with a mutt they'd chosen from a pet rescue center a month earlier. Sighing with contentment, she rubbed her very pregnant belly and said to the little one inside, Song, you are going to love your father and brother and sister. And when you're old enough, your father and I will read Dr. Thomas Matthews' journals to you. We've read them to Leon and Noel many times and they always want to hear them again. You'll learn about Thomas and Tana and their three children, and all the animals they cared for. You'll learn about Tana's mother, Mariah, and grandmother, Frannie. And someday we'll tell you about the magic of Angelica who is really Frannie. It's an unbelievable story and I've written my own journal about it.
Jason called, "Honey, I'm taking the children to the Spirit Tree. Do you want to come?"
Sunny patted her belly. "No, I think Song and I will hang out on the porch."
"Bye, Mom," called Noel.
Leon waved. "We'll be back soon, Mom."
Jason blew her a kiss and then headed toward the trail with the children.
Sunny reached for the envelope she'd set on the table beside her tea and opened it again. Rereading the contents, she finally felt completion of a task she and Jason had begun shortly after their marriage. It had taken two years, but now her ancestry and history—as much as could be known—was complete. The researchers had scanned archives and old newspapers, census records, ships' manifests, and even traveled to Ireland in their search. Now Sunny had a better understanding of the family she had always longed for. Placing the documents back in the envelope she leaned her head against the rocker and merged the researchers' information with that of Dr. Thomas Matthews' journals.
Her sixth great-grandparents had traveled via ship from Ireland to America and settled on the east coast. However, their daughter, whose name was Angelica according to the ship's manifest, had literally dreamed of a valley surrounded by red monoliths. Her mother, knowing that the women of her lineage were gifted psychics, convinced her husband that they must travel to the red rocks.
And so they did.
Angelica, called Frannie by her family, later married the son of an Apache medicine man and birthed one child, a daughter named Mariah. Mariah married a trapper and their daughter was Tana. Dr. Matthews' journal often mentioned how Tana was visited in dreams by her grandmother Frannie, and how she always felt the presence of loved ones who had passed on.
Sunny glanced around the cabin's porch and moved her gaze to the barn and small cabin, pines and high desert shrubbery, and whispered into the wind, "I feel you, too."
A sudden gust lifted her hair and she laughed aloud, "I know that's you, Angelica."
She returned to her ponderings. When Thomas and Tana married, he already had two children, a daughter named Amy, by his first wife, and an adopted son, Josiah. They were close in age and as they grew into adulthood, they fell in love. Dr. Matthews said their wedding was one of the happiest days of his life. He said neighbors came from miles around and even Tana's Indian family was there.
Josiah and Amy had two boys. The oldest left home at the age of twenty-one, never married, and became a doctor in San Francisco. The other remained on the family's land that had been legally registered as a homestead by Dr. Matthews so as to keep it in the family. The young man married and had two children, a son and a daughter. Sunny now believed that the second cabin had been built to house the enlarging family. Death records showed that Thomas died in 1922 from a heart attack and Tana in 1925. The cause of her death was listed as "unknown."
In 1930 Tana's widowed daughter and granddaughter decided to vacation in Ireland, but stayed when the granddaughter met her future husband. That granddaughter had been Sunny's grandmother. Sunny's mother, Naomi, after the death of her family in Ireland, came to America in the 1970s to live on the homestead she'd always heard about, but by that time all of her U.S. relatives had died and the land lost in foreclosure due to unpaid property taxes. The last owner in Sunny's family, Josiah and Amy's granddaughter, had built her dream home on the land with her husband in 1940, however, according to accounts, she became a recluse after his death during World War II. She died during the foreclosure process in the late 60s.
Before returning to Ireland, Sunny's mother met and married a man thirty years her senior and happily lived in Tucson with him until his sudden death when Sunny was a baby. After that, Naomi had stayed in Tucson and supported herself and Sunny by waitressing. Sunny wondered if her mother would have ever told her about the land they'd lost. Probably not. She'd seemed content to reveal their family's history only in legends, or maybe she'd already known the outcome of Sunny's search for family.
Sunny rubbed her belly again and sighed with happiness. Speaking to her unborn child, she said, "Song, this land, this cabin, our ancestors and our descendants, are all woven into the fabric of eternity. Our joys and sorrows are seams and rips in that fabric. Whether we abide in body or spirit we are forever linked. We carry within us the fundamental nature of the universe—love. And although the knot may slip, it will never unravel. A thousand years from now, it will remain.
Sunny smiled when she heard a familiar voice speaking to her heart. "So true, dearest, so true."