On Good Ground

Please note: On Good Ground is a short prequel story (approx. 35 pages) designed as a quick, sweet introduction to the full-length novel series Heirs of the Orchard.

Spring, 1926. Everett Gibson buries his father on a Tuesday. On Wednesday he climbs the Ridge Road with a mattock and a bundle of bare-root apple trees and plants the first row of an orchard on thirty acres of rock and broom sedge that nobody in the county has wanted in twenty years.

Ruth Bramlett has been watching him come into her father's drugstore all winter, counting out exact change for his father's medicine. She was raised in the church on the square, knowing without ever being told which families are "our kind" and which live up the branch.

When Everett asks her father for his blessing, the answer is polite, respectable, and final. And when Ruth walks up the hill to see what he's planted, she discovers that the hardest prejudice to face isn't her parents'. It's the one she's been carrying all her life without knowing it.

On Good Ground is a clean, faith-filled prequel to Heirs of the Orchard: the story of the hill, the first row, and the love that took root there a hundred years before the Gibsons' story begins.