Plot

In the late 1890s, a young widow becomes a successful farmer and can send her son, nicknamed 'So Big', to college. After graduating, he finds a job as an architect, but forgoes his dream in favor of an immediate financial success.

After the death of her father and the loss of his fortune, Selina takes a job teaching school in the Dutch community of New Holland. She stays with the Pools and teaches young Roelf piano. He has a crush on her, but it is Pervus she marries. Dirk is their only child. After a few years Pervus dies. With a young child and only the farm, Selina begins her quest to grow high quality vegetables. She wants more for Dirk and guides his life until he graduates from college as an architect. As her vegetable label prospers, she sees Paula control Dirk's life as he moves away from creating and into sales, which is not where he wants to go.—Tony Fontana <tony.fontana@spacebbs.com>

The life of Selina De Jong née Peake from her time as a young woman in the 1890s to middle age in the 1920s is told centered on her belief, handed down to her from her father, that there are only two kinds of people in the world that matter in they creating all that is beautiful: "emeralds", such as artists, and "wheat", such as builders and farmers. From a privileged Chicago background, she, an emerald, is forced to abandon her finishing school education upon her father's sudden death, he leaving her penniless. She ends up taking a job as a schoolteacher in the nearby Dutch farming community of New Holland, she boarding with the Pool family on their farm. In her view of the world, she has to transition her life to being a wheat in marrying farmer Pervus De Jong, brusque, uneducated but loving. Regardless, the marriage does not sit well with the Pools' oldest offspring, teenage Roelf Pool in he having his first crush on her, she who fostered his love of music. Selina is also able to hand down her view of the world to her and Pervus' only offspring, Dirk De Jong, who, as a child, was nicknamed "So Big". In learning about farming in all its aspects, Selina, in transforming the farm and how the world views her place in farming, is able to save enough money to send Dirk through college, he obtaining a Bachelor of Architecture, an architect which he wanted to be since he was a child. Dirk's view of the world changes upon the urging of his well-off girlfriend, childhood friend Paula Hempel, whose view of success is money and the proverbial corner office, he in the process abandoning his design focus in it being in Paula's mind too long a path to "success" to work in sales at the architecture firm where he works. While he does get that corner office and the trappings of wealth in the process, Dirk may view his life in a different vein upon meeting artist Dallas O'Mara, and reconnecting with Roelf, now a composer, both renowned in their field, and both who have the same view of the world as Selina in money in and of itself not being a source of happiness or a measure of success.—Huggo