Chapter One

People don't like to believe it these days, but she was a saint, and that's not a figure of speech. I'm talking actual miracles, visitations, a papal research committee.

But while she lived no one suspected it because she had 14 children and had never married. So no one knew, not even her kids, until 7 months after she died.

It was the winter of 1887. You can read about it in history books. Even as far south as her Ontario farm, the ground froze as hard as metal. Blue ice covered everything, started to cover even your face if you exhaled outside more than 5 times. It was so cold that the snow -- like they say happens in Antarctica -- became dry and raspy as sand, tiny shards of glass. You couldn't sled on it or ski. You couldn't make snowmen. The snow would cut at your skin and scrape against your coat while you slogged through a drift.It took more than a year for the ground to really thaw from that winter, for the air to really warm. The summer in between was shy and short-lived, mostly just a short gasp before the next, more normal winter. Nowadays people would have a scientific explanation for all this. They would have words to make sense of it, like