SarahForestdale
Where Wild Things Take Root
A Walton's Mountain Story
Autumn, 1933.
Sixteen-year-old Hazel Bennett arrives on Walton's Mountain carrying a bundle of handwritten stories, a voice made for singing, and more responsibility than any girl her age should know.
The Bennett family is new to the mountain, and Hazel is determined to keep their troubles private. She knows how to smile when questions become too personal, how to change the subject when someone grows curious, and how to protect the people she loves without asking anything for herself.
Then she meets the Waltons.
John-Boy discovers a writer hidden beneath Hazel's quiet manner. Jason hears music in her words before she has the courage to sing them. As Hazel's younger siblings form friendships with the Walton children, the Bennetts are slowly drawn into the warmth, noise, and loyalty of a family unlike any they have ever known.
But Hazel has spent a long time believing that some doors are better left closed.
As autumn settles over the mountain, stories are shared beside the schoolhouse, songs begin beside the spring, and two brothers find themselves drawn to the same wild-haired girl for very different reasons. For the first time, Hazel begins to wonder whether she might become more than the life she has been given.
Yet being truly known requires a kind of courage she is not certain she possesses.
On Walton's Mountain, wild things grow in unlikely places, songs can reveal what words cannot, and even a heart that has never belonged anywhere may someday find good soil in which to take root.
This is an unofficial work of The Waltons fanfiction, written with love for the original series and the family who made a mountain feel like home.