Showing results by author "Cyndi Tillery Hodges" in All Categories

"I’m a Stranger Here” could be the song title guiding Lizzie Baker’s life. In the five years she spent on Brown Mountain during the Civil War, Lizzie wanted nothing more than to find the light that transported her back in time and return to the 20th century. While fleeing from bushwhackers in 1864, Lizzie, her friend Abbie Collins, and fiancé Josh Hampton encounter a light Lizzie believes is hers. Hoping to get to safety, she pushes Abbie into the light, expecting Josh to follow. She and Abbie wake to find that this is not the Brown Mountain they remember.

Although Lizzie Baker wants nothing more than to return to her time 110 years in the future, she remains stuck on Brown Mountain, NC, during the time of the Civil War - the bloodiest conflict in American history. An abolitionist, Lizzie lives in a state that has seceded from the Union and finds herself, as a woman of that era, unable to protect slaves being mistreated by their plantation owners, as well as women who suffer at the hands of their husbands, without rights or laws to protect them.

In the mid-1920s, Bessie Elliott and her husband Fletcher take in their six-year-old nephew John. They are determined to give him a warm and secure home on Stone Mountain, a place where he will feel loved and know he is always welcome. Having a child brings many changes to their daily life and even more for John, but it isn't long before he feels completely at home with his aunt and uncle.

In the second decade of the 20th century, major world events resonate even on secluded Stone Mountain where Bessie Elliott lives with her husband Fletcher. There's a great war, one that takes away many young men, including Bessie's kin, some never to return. Bessie's role of healer intensifies as she treats those suffering from the Spanish flu and tries to keep it from spreading further on her mountain. She defends a young woman who's in the middle of a controversy that threatens to tear her community apart.

Healer/time traveler Lizzie Baker remains in the mid 21st century, where chaos reigns as a foreign army slowly makes its way toward Brown Mountain, North Carolina. The horror stories told by people fleeing the invaders are frightening and Lizzie’s skills as a healer are in constant demand tending to the sick and injured, never knowing that this itself places her own life in danger.

Although healer/time traveler Lizzie Baker knows the possibility of war looms ahead, she elects to stay in the 21st century, instead of going back 100 years to her time or to the 19th century, where she spent the last five years of her life. The threat of war becomes a reality when Lizzie treats a fatally injured man in Morganton, North Carolina, who tells of the invasion of America by a foreign country.

After Bessie and Fletcher Elliott lose all their money when their bank fails at the beginning of the Great Depression, Fletch is forced to seek employment elsewhere in order to sustain their struggling farm on Stone Mountain, North Carolina. Fletch’s brothers, Jim and Tom, working in a coal mine in Beacham, West Virginia, convince Fletch that there is money to be made as a miner, so he and Bessie move to Beacham in hopes of a temporary measure that will enable them to keep their farm.