The Life of the Tree

Martha's Norwegian grandparents risked everything in the 1850's to come to the land of promise: America. Comfortable in their two-story white farmhouse in 1906, Martha's Pa decided to trade their comfortable life in southern Minnesota to homestead in the Dakotas. Selling everything, he moved his young family to a dirt-floored 'soddy' on the North Dakota prairie. In desperate need of help but unable to afford a hired hand, Erick Johnson taught his daughters Martha and Agnes, ages 10 and 9, to plow their fallow fields behind a team of oxen. Using every fiber of their tiny beings to keep the plow turning the sun-baked earth, the girls plan what they will do with their pay - a penny for each time they circle the field. Returning exhausted and dirty to their sod house each evening the girls proudly tell Pa how many pennies they earned that day. When payday finally arrived after selling their grain in the fall, the family excitedly visit the general store in the newly founded town of Plaza, North Dakota. Their hearts leap when they spy the fancy patent leather shoes they dreamed and saved for.
Leaving the store in great disappointment, they carry the more practical 'clod-hoppers' that Pa insisted on. They eye their clumsy new shoes with contempt. Wide, heavy, brown and ugly, the clod-hoppers will more easily break up clumps of earth behind the oxen next spring. "Its not about the shoes, Agnes," Martha explained nobly through her tears. "We helped Pa when he needed us. That's what counts."
With great insight into her everyday life, we follow Martha's life on the prairie. The oldest of 10 children, Martha's beloved father dies young, leaving the young family to fend for them self in an often harsh and hungry land. Falling in love with a handsome, enterprising Swedish immigrant, Martha raises a big family of her own in the Dakotas during the Great Depression. With innocence, good humor, laughter and tears, Martha faces life and death issues on the prairie in the early 1900's - from life in their sod house, birthing babies at home, precious secrets and laughter, visits from Mandan Indians, gypsies, homelessness, locusts, and reaping the rewards of faith and perseverance.