Mary Ann is busy baking an apple pie

in her dutch oven, sitting on the hearth on its three legs. The coals under it, and the coals heaped on the lid and covered with ash, keep an even temperature for the pie to bake. She was up before the sun, kneading loaves of her sourdough bread. It was the same sourdough starter her mother had used in Indiana, and later in Iowa, and now brought with them to Oregon. The loaves sat on the hearth bricks at just the right distance from the flame. While the bread and the pie baked, Mary Ann churned the cream that rose to the top of the pail of milk that James delivered to the house after milking the cow. She shook her head, silently still amazed that the old churn, attached with ropes to the side of their wagon, had survived the trip intact. 

While she accomplished her household chores, she thought about the book, Pilgrim's Progress, that James purchased in Corvallis.  Her father often mentioned Paul Bunyan, the author, as a good man to imitate, because he kept his faith through prison and persecution.

John Bunyan dreaming of Pilgrim's Progress,
Encyclopædia Britannica, Access Date: October 21, 2022.
Original a 17th-century illustration.

Mary Ann hoped she would not dream the kind of dreams that John Bunyan dreamed to write Pilgrim's Progress. Some of them were too terrifying, too real.