Jenny Grant is the new friend I met when I was stuck in San Francisco to finish out the winter school term. How did I get there? Oh, such a twist of fate! Just when I thought I’d be having myself an unexpected holiday with Taffy, the grammar school in town got shut down because of an unexpected, horrid flood.
My mother got this incredibly terrible idea to make me finish school at a fancy, young-lady’s school in the City. Jenny Grant was my new roommate at the school. She is just about my age, maybe a little older, the daughter of a logger and sawmill owner in the middle of nowhere! Jenny is kind of wild, with lots of tangly red hair and more freckles than a body can count. People may think that I don’t act much like a lady, but goodness! Jenny has me beat all the way around in the tomboy department.
Jenny is the only girl in her family, with a whole passel of brothers. I can’t keep them straight, but the oldest is Josiah, who is about Mitch’s age. Then come Seth, then Caleb. Micah is next, two years older than Jenny, and Gideon is the youngest, a few years younger than Jenny. So, she’s smack in the middle of five boys. This is Josiah, age 21
Here is Elijah (Eli) and he is age 19. He is the jokster of the family, and Jenny is sometimes the brunt of his teasing (hmmm, like Chad maybe?) are Caleb (on the left), age 16, and Seth age 19. Jenny is from some backwoods place called Washington Territory. Her mother sent her to San Francisco hoping the school would teach her young lady ways. So far, it’s not working very well.
This is Caleb. He’s 18 and the youngest of the three Grant Brothers “trio.” He likes logging but prefers the sawmill and loading and unloading the lumber onto the ships. He likes to accompany his father on business trips.
Jenny and I get into all kinds of interesting scrapes together in the City. And some scary ones too. Later that summer, Jenny visited the ranch (Trouble with Treasure). We joined Mitch and Cory on a two-week camping trip up to our Sugar Pine lumber camp. Things did not go well.
This is Micah, age 14. Later that summer, I visited Jenny up in Washington Territory. I met her brothers and learned to catch and eat Dungeness crab. I even saved her little brother, Gideon’s, life when he went overboard into the icy Puget Sound. You can read that story in the new Tales book that comes out next spring, 2025.
The youngest is Gideon, age 9. He is the only other red-haired Grant sibling. He’s all arms and legs and wears his brothers’ old hand-me-down overalls.
Jenny grows up and I don’t see her much, but we run into each other in a very special way in Circle C Milestones book 6, Stranger in the Glade: More Tales from Memory Creek Ranch.
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