Book 3 of the series: SUNNY OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST In Canyon de Chelly, among the magnificent red rock formations and under the blue skies of Arizona, three little girls played in the desert sand. All three were a bit small, but they were hard workers. Trading more and more of the play of youth for the work of adulthood, they grew into capable young women. They were sisters, and not, because two were and the third was a cousin. But they were like sisters. The real sisters were two years apart, and the cousin called Jóhonaá sat in the middle. Later her true love from another culture would interpret that name as 'Sunny'. All were born in the middle of the nineteenth century, between 1845 and 1847, a turbulent time. The United States and Mexico fought a short, hard, controversial war at that time, and land that The People, the young girls' people, thought was theirs went from Mexican control to American control. These desert maidens of the Diné might have lived out their lives in the beautifully austere land of their birth had the Navajo not made war on the invading U.S. government and others. But there would have been trouble anyway as whites encroached upon Diné lands, treating The People as if they weren't good enough to own land. And so life, in the guise of history, kicked them in the gut with defeat, internment, and long marches of either surrender or escape, depending on the fate of each particular girl. They lost loved ones and each other, becoming like scattered pieces of a puzzle. Finding themselves within the society of their enemy, each woman sought to put their small three piece part of the broader puzzle together again, sought to find each other and to find solace in their own tormented lives. Finding the good in life where it lay, even among the invading conquerors, these daughters of the Old Southwest dealt with what life and the Creator handed them, whether meager or bountiful.
