The unsentimental, unflinching, and utterly unforgettable voices in Woven on the Wind take us into the souls, kitchens, barns, and along the country roads of nearly 150 western women, showing us how, in a life stripped down to what really matters, friendship can ground us and help us to grow. This is a book filled with heroines. A nun recounts the courageous story of pioneering sisters who left Bavaria to establish a Benedictine convent in Colorado. A mother makes a harrowing bus trip during a legendary storm to bring her blind daughter home for Christmas, encountering very different women who bring her comfort and perspective. A woman comes to terms with the role her huband's mistress played in her own freedom and indepencence.
Daughters learn how to cook, how to drive, how to ride, and how to work.
Through marrriage, childbirth, drought, careers, and suicide, these stories show that friendship knows no boundaries. In the West, women find and lean on each other without regard to differences in race, religion, politics, or age. Like the sagebrush plant that characterizes the region, the women who thrive in Woven on the Wind are filled with simple beauty, hardiness, and a symbiotic nature. Beneath the outer bark of sagebrush hides a slender white filament called the heart thread. The women in these pages break through the dark shell of silence and reveal their hearts.