Joyce Shaughnessy's Blog: Joyce Shaughnessy Writes - Posts Tagged "great-depression"

A Healing Place starts in the Dustbowl of the Great Depression where the Miller family of parents and three girls live on a farm in Ok. The Dustbowl becomes a terrible problem over many states, making it impossible to grow produce but also enveloping everyone in such thick and profuse dust that it makes it impossible to breathe. It literally chokes people to death. Black Sunday comes to the states and the dust literally covered the sun. Several children were lost and never found, many people died as well as livestock. The Millers are finally evicted from their farm and follow the highway to California like so many others when they decide that there are too many to make a wage out there, so they turn toward the Texas oil fields, where they finally end up in Texon, Texas which was an actual camp. I lived there from age one to ten. It not only provided everything they needed but also gave them a sense of community, which they needed to heal as a family. Their son-in-law goes into the army and is in the Philippine Islands when WWII breaks out. He is forced to walk the infamous Death March, in which the Japanese slaughtered 12,500 men, and goes into enemy camps where he farms and starves. Jed finds his healing place in the power of prayer.