A Touch of Grace Read Online Free PDF

of that. This ointment I’m using contains honey and will help too.”
    “Honey?”
    “Surprising, I know, but honey helps speed the healing.” While they talked, she wrapped his hand in strips of white cotton and tied the ends neatly on the back of his hand.
    “Did you take medical training?”
    “No, and that’s why I am so grateful we have Dr. Elizabeth here now. I’m not called on for much doctoring anymore.” She gathered her supplies and put each back in its proper place in her leather satchel. “This bag has seen many miles.”
    Jonathan stood and glanced over at the table. “Your bread—it’s about to fall on the floor.”
    Ingeborg turned and her laughter trailed over her shoulder as she crossed the room to retrieve her rising bread before it slipped off the table. “Obviously the yeast is working well.” She quickly washed her hands then flipped the dough back into the crockery bowl. “Could I prevail upon you to bring in several armloads of wood? The woodbox is nearing empty. But don’t pick them up with the bandaged hand.”
    “Of course.”
    “You’ll find gloves in a box on the shelf to the right of the door on the porch. Leave your cut one here, and I’ll find some leather to patch it with.”
    She went back to kneading her bread while Jonathan filled the woodbox and left the house whistling. She should write and tell his parents how well he was doing and what a fine young man they had raised. Her thoughts returned to the cheese house and the bumper crop of waxed cheese wheels she had growing out there. The shelves were rapidly filling with aging cheese, and with the new cows both she and some of the other farmers had bought; she might have to add on again. She’d been right in insisting they add to the milk herd, even though she hated for her and Haakan not to be in accord.
    After wiping a trickle of perspiration from her forehead with the back of her hand, she turned the dough in the bowl, laid a clean towel over it, and set it to rise on the shelf in the sun. The extra kneading would make it a finer grained bread. She checked the roasting haunch of venison from a young buck Andrew had shot as it grazed in the wheat field, and then closed the oven door before pouring herself a cup of coffee and going out to sit in the sun on the back porch.
    She should be hoeing potatoes, weeding carrots, or doing any number of chores that waited patiently, but instead, she lifted her face to the sun’s caress. Always after the long winter, she craved the sun as a starving child craved bread. She noticed Grace did too, even from when she was a small child. Almost like an instinctive reaction to warmth. She sipped her coffee and glanced toward the barn, where Jonathan and Andrew were repairing harnesses, one of those ongoing necessities that usually got done in the long months of winter. Where had the time gone, or was it just that there weren’t as many growing children at home to help with the daily chores? Or was Haakan slowing down?
    That thought had been nagging at her. She hesitated to call it a fear because she believed what the Bible said when it commanded Fear not . Fear not, so simple and easy to say, but actually doing it was the hard part. While Haakan never complained, hadn’t she seen him flinch sometimes when twisting? Or was her imagination trying to run off with her? It had happened before. She held her cup in both hands and closed her eyes.
    “Please, Lord, take care of Haakan. If there is something wrong, bring healing, give him the strength to do what he feels needs to be done. I know you love him better than I can. I thank you for giving me such a fine man to love and grow old with.”
    Uff da! What’s with all this thinking on getting older? Just get busy and quit sitting in the sunshine. It’s making you feel as lazy as those cats sleeping in the sun by the barn wall . She tossed the coffee dregs on the rosebush, which already had buds. Once spring came, plants in North Dakota