Lynda Martin Tarot Card Reader and Palmist

EASTER WEEKEND HOURS FOR
LYNDA MARTIN
11 AM - 6PM

To all the lovely people who keep coming to see me. I am so pleased that you all do

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM
Lynda Martin Tarot Card Reader & Palmist

Two sisters, both under fourteen, were left alone on a frozen homestead when fever took their father. What they did next with frozen hands and empty stomachs changed the meaning of survival.
Wyoming Territory, 1883. Their cabin stood twenty miles from the nearest neighbor. Winter arrived early that year and settled in with a harsh grip. Sarah was thirteen, and Emma was eleven when their father died one November morning. His body was still warm when they realized that they were alone.
The law stated that orphans should be sent to relatives or institutions. Their relatives lived far to the east. The nearest town had an orphanage known for labor contracts and cold beds. Without saying it out loud, the sisters made their choice. They would stay. They would keep the only home they had. They would survive together.
No one had prepared them for the tasks ahead. Sarah knew how to mend clothes and can vegetables. Emma could read and do math. Neither knew how to keep a fire alive overnight in freezing temperatures or how to butcher meat or repair a winter roof. They learned because they had no other option.
During the first week, they burned through their firewood too quickly, not yet understanding how to save coals until morning. They ate raw potatoes when the kindling ran out. Emma cried herself to sleep. Sarah waited until she thought her sister was resting before she cried too.
Children can become what hardship demands.
Sarah studied their father’s hunting book by candlelight and taught herself to set snares. Emma learned to read tracks in the snow. They took turns staying awake so the fire would never die and so nothing could approach without warning.
January brought a blizzard that buried the door in snow. They dug their way out with a cast iron skillet and their hands. They pulled fallen branches through waist-high drifts to feed the stove. Their fingers cracked and bled. They wrapped them in torn petticoats and kept going.
The toughest day came in February. Emma fell through thin ice while gathering water. Sarah pulled her out, stripped her wet clothes, and wrapped her in every blanket they had. She lay beside her, sharing warmth until Emma’s skin changed from blue to white to pink again. When Emma finally slept, breathing steadily, Sarah whispered into the dark that nothing was going to take her sister. Not then. Not ever.
Spring felt like a gift they hardly dared hope for. The ground softened. New green shoots pushed through the thaw. A traveling minister passed by in April and found two thin, determined girls planting a kitchen garden with quiet skill.
He asked where their people were.
Sarah looked up at him, dirt under her nails, her voice steady. She said that they were their own people.
He tried to insist that children should not live alone. Emma stepped beside her sister and reminded him that they had survived winter and would manage anything else that came.
And they did.
Years later, after Sarah married and moved to town, she returned to the homestead to gather a few belongings. Inside their father’s Bible, she found a note written in Emma’s careful hand, dated January 18, 1884. It said:
If I fall, you keep going. If you fall, I carry you. That is the promise. That is how we win.
Sarah sat on the floor and wept. Not from grief, but from the weight of knowing what they had meant to one another. They had not just survived. They had protected each other with every scrap of strength they had.
People often talk about strength as something you are born with. The sisters learned a different truth. Strength is a choice you make when giving up would be easier. Strength is splitting the last piece of bread and pretending you are not hungry. Strength is staying awake so someone you love can rest. Strength is keeping the promise you whispered in the dark.
Some bonds are not shaped by time. They are forged in the heat of impossible circumstances. When you survive that together, you do not just have family. You have proof that love, steady and stubborn, can outlast any winter the world brings.

Credit : Respective owner

Well, I have been in Chippy for over a year now and it has turned out to be amazing. I didn't expect such a warm welcome.