In 1873, quiet Mary Harrington's husband, drunk and violent, leaves their remote Nebraska homestead. She and her five-year-old child wait for him to return. But three months later, he is still gone. By then they are starving. They have no choice but to ride out into the frigid Nebraska winter, searching for help. They stumble into a struggling community of only a handful of people. Mary squats in an abandoned building and begs for work at the Emigrant rooming house. Weeks go by; they have no food but that which Mary can steal from slop buckets and the unguarded rooming house’s cellar. A cook's job comes available. Mary can do it, but the law won't allow her to be paid without her husband's approval. So, in exchange for Mary's labor, the rooming house proprietor offers two bowls of food a day. Barely surviving, Mary and her son continue to hope for Mary's husband to return. Some time later, he passes through, now a drover of longhorns. She approaches him, but he raises his whip at her, and spits, and turns away. She realizes, then, she can rely on no one but herself. Alone, she must find a way to survive, and care for her child. But how? An anonymous offer comes to by a claim Mary’s husband took out in her name and she learns the unproven land has some value. But an attorney tells her the law will not allow her to sell without her husband’s permission, something she has no power to get. She asks the attorney to help. He petitions the courts to declare her husband dead. She sells the claim and buys a small house in town where she becomes a profitable dressmaker. Her health declines just as she finds love from a kind man, someone unlike her husband. Her son grows head-strong, insisting he will quit high school. She demands he finish even college, the only way he not turn out like his father. Written In the rich tone of Willa Cather, “The Seasons of Doubt” describes a hardscrabble mother who survives to raise her child during times that were unkind to women.