“There are other things on my mind, too, as you know,” Anna admitted. “I’m in a deep quandary.” She paused and swallowed hard. “For one thing, Mamm wasn’t too pleased with me after I told her more about Gabe while I was home. And she wasn’t all that interested in my friendship with Emmie, either. She kept asking about Mart, wondering if we were regularly dating yet, and given the circumstance of Mammi Eliza’s passing, I didn’t know how to tell her what I was feeling for Gabe.”

Sadie was quick to nod her head, although her expression was filled with questions.

“Like Mammi, I don’t want to have any regrets at the end of my life,” Anna said, thinking again that, from a practical standpoint, Mart was the only real choice. Yet when she was honest with herself, she felt only a friendship and an admiration toward him—a far cry from what she felt for Gabe.

“Regrets can’t change the past, and worry can’t alter the future,” Sadie said as they walked out to the little porch, where she stood till Anna pulled out of the driveway.

I don’t want my parents to regret giving their blessing for me to come here, either, Anna thought while driving the now-familiar backroads of Strasburg.

She soaked up the autumn landscape, her prayers less pleadings for wisdom and more about gratitude for Mammi’s long and happy life of service to God and others, and for the daily blessings Anna enjoyed from the Lord’s hand. Blessings of salvation and mercy, health and employment, family and friends, too. And she was thankful for both Mart’s and Gabe’s kindnesses toward her . . . and for each man’s devotion to Christ.

As she drove, she came upon a wide shoulder on the road and parked her car. Getting out to walk, she decided to offer only thankful prayers as she went. Large flocks of birds circled high above her, then rushed en masse toward the west, where wispy white clouds moved slowly this way. Anna noticed a hawk preening atop a tall martin birdhouse in someone’s yard, and a wild turkey dashed across a meadow toward a large pond on this side of the road. An old stone wall was set apart from the farmhouses surrounding it, and Anna suddenly realized she had been walking near a long, dense row of black walnut trees. Glancing between their furrowed dark trunks, she realized that she had driven past this stone wall quite some time ago.

Moving closer to the trees, she clung to happy thoughts of Mammi Eliza, embracing Mammi’s rambling thoughts about Strasburg, stone walls, and a beau. The setting suddenly seemed more meaningful with Mammi having passed on, and in that moment, Anna wondered if she would ever know more about her grandmother’s Strasburg love story.