Tending Roses (38 page)

 

I think
Tending Roses
grew out of a need to communicate that process of soul-searching. I stumbled upon my notebook of Grandma’s stories while cleaning out a desk drawer, and the idea just came to me. I started writing, and the words flowed so fast, I could hardly keep my hand on the keyboard. When I was finished the first day, I had written two chapters of something that was unlike anything I had ever done. I had never before poured so much of my heart into something or written something that was a combination of my own life and fiction. I had a strong desire to create something that had a sense of goodness to it, where good people do the right thing and wonderful things happen to them.

 

Q.
How long did you spend writing the book?

 

A. The original manuscript took about four months to write. It was more like catharsis than work. The words just seemed to flow, almost as if I was typing a book that had already been written somewhere in my mind. Of course, then I had to revise it about four times!

 

Q.
How much of the book is from your own experience?

 

A. Kate’s feelings about motherhood and the struggle between career, a sense of self, and the demands of motherhood were from my own experience. The difficulty of maintaining self-esteem while being “just” a stay-at-home mom was from my own experience. The power of finding faith in God and forgiveness for those around us were from my own experience, and certainly so were the sense of the importance of parenthood and the need for closeness and the support of extended family.

 

Happily, a lot of the family problems in the book were fictional. The members of my family are an understanding lot, and we have never suffered the pain of being estranged from one another, though we have often lived at opposite corners of the country, which can create some of the same loneliness and longings.

 

Q.
Your book deals with so many important themes. Which ones do you hope will generate the most discussion?

 

A. I think some of the more nebulous themes are the importance of family, the need for forgiveness, and the value of faith. Some of the more concrete themes include the question of motherhood versus career, the notion of quality time versus quantity time with loved ones, the duty to care for one another, especially the elderly, and the difficulty of deciding how best to care for elderly parents and grandparents. Secondary themes include the importance of active fathers, the materialistic focus of society, the needs of disadvantaged children, and the loss of the family homestead.

 

Q.
What do you see as the most important secondary themes in the book?

 

A. Dell’s situation is certainly a secondary theme in the book. Thinking about my grandmother’s hardships growing up made me realize that, even in this wealthy, advanced, speed-of-light society, many children still grow up with seemingly insurmountable difficulties and desperately need the kindness of strangers. The materialistic focus of today’s society is also an important secondary theme. These days, we’re convinced we are failures if we don’t have everything. My grandmother had a lot to say about that.

 

The importance of community is an inescapable theme in the book. Human beings are basically tribal animals, and I think that these days a lot of us are missing a tribe.

 

Q.
Where are you personally at this stage of your life?

 

A. Well, I am the mother of two young sons who keep me running and keep me laughing. I wanted girls. I got boys. I never dreamed that boys could be so wonderful. But that is another story.

 

My husband and I live on a small ranch in the Texas hill country—a beautiful area filled with rugged vistas, ancient trees, and a strong sense of the past. We are avid horse people and spend a great deal of our spare time in various equine pursuits. We think we may have watched too many cowboy movies when we were young.

 

I have always, always, always been a writer, and cannot remember a time when I didn’t write. My older brother, Brandon, taught me how to read and write before I started kindergarten. I wrote and illustrated my first book at five years old and have never stopped writing. I had a very special first-grade teacher, who recognized a little ability and a lot of desire in a small, shy transfer student and started reading my stories to the class. I quickly discovered the joy of having an audience and set out on many, many writing projects, with childhood dreams of one day being published.

 

Somewhere in between writing projects, I attended Oklahoma State University, received a B.A. in Technical English, and married my husband, Sam, also an OSU grad. After college, I took a job as a technical writer and continued writing and selling freelance projects on the side. Over the years, I have published various fiction and nonfiction titles, and have written more computer manuals than I can count. Fiction has always been my first love, particularly anything with a sense of history and triumph of the human spirit.

 

Q.
What things inspire you?

 

A. People inspire me. God inspires me. Love inspires me. Life’s everyday miracles inspire me. I think most of us are stronger than we know, capable of more than we have ever imagined. I like to write about people pushing aside life’s confines and roadblocks and setting the spirit free. I like to write about people forgetting the destination and enjoying the journey.

 

Q.
Are you working on another book now?

 

A. I am working on another novel that combines fiction with true stories and a sense of the past. The main character is very different from Kate, but is also in a rut and searching for her life’s meaning. The themes are in some ways similar to
Tending Roses
and in some ways different. Just as no two people are the same, no two characters are the same, and no two stories the same.

 

Which is what makes life interesting, and fiction fun, and keeps writers writing. It’s all just . . . sort of . . . potluck. You never know what’s going to be in the next dish until you open it.

1. Lynne Hinton, bestselling author of
Friendship Cake
, a novel that celebrates female friendship, has praised
Tending Roses
as a “rich story of family and faith that reminds us of the bittersweet seasons of life and our call to care for each other.” What do you think she means by “the bittersweet seasons of life”?

 

2. How do the various characters in
Tending Roses
care for each other? Do you agree that we are all called to do so? Are we as obliged to care for people outside our families as we are for immediate family members? In your own life, how are you heeding or not heeding that call?

 

3. The wildflower journal continues to make mysterious appearances throughout the novel. Do you think Grandma deliberately leaves the book for Kate to read? Why does she choose to convey her advice in this way rather than verbally?

 

4. After reading
Tending Roses
and calling upon your own experience, do you think a mother or father can have a demanding career and still be a good parent? Is it naive to think you can “have it all”—both a satisfying career and an active role in raising children?

 

5. The author suggests that focusing on obtaining a lot of “stuff” makes it more difficult to nurture a healthy family. To what extent do you agree or disagree? If you wanted to simplify your own life, where would you start?

 

6. Some of the tension between Kate and her sister, Karen, arises from their very different situations—Kate’s as a stay-at-home mom and Karen’s as a childless career woman. Have you experienced a similar tension in your own family or community? What’s at the root of this kind of problem, and how might you begin to diffuse it?

 

THERE is a moth in a cocoon outside the window. It has been there for months, twisted by the wind, dampened by the rain, a reminder that the windowframes should have been cleaned and painted last fall. It is spring, and there is a tiny hole in the end of the cocoon, a tiny probe pushing through, sawing back and forth, struggling to free the creature inside.

The moth has labored for hours, and only now has it pushed two legs through the hole. Inside in the darkness, does it know why it must struggle? Somewhere in the mass of cells and neurons that make up its tiny body, is it aware that the struggle is God’s way of pumping fluid into its wings? If not for the struggle, it would come into the world with a swollen body and flightless wings. It would be a creature without strength, unable to fulfill its purpose.

I wonder if it can sense the warmth of my hand on the other side of the glass as night falls and another spring storm blows in.

On nights like this, I do not sleep. I sit awake and listen as the storms howl through the valley. Like the moth, I have emerged in a place that was once beyond my imagining.

Outside, I hear a gust of wind, and I remember. I remember where I have come from, and it is as if every blessing in my life has been showered anew around me.

I fall to my knees, and I thank God for everything. Even for the wind. For the fragments of my life that survived it, and the fragments that didn’t, and the things that were changed forever. . . .

 

On the afternoon of July 29, the entire town of Poetry, Missouri, was cast to the wind. The town rained down around me for what seemed like an eternity as the tornado receded into the sky and disappeared, spitting out what was left of Poetry.

I stood watching, thinking it was the most horrible, awesome sight I had ever seen, unlike anything I had experienced in my twenty-one years of living. If Daddy had been home he would have yelled at me for not having sense enough to go to the cellar. But once you start watching something so enormous and so vile, it pulls you in just as surely as if you were caught in the vortex itself. I don’t know what it is that makes people want to look into the face of evil. . . .

“Dear God. Dear God,” I remember saying. My mind couldn’t comprehend what was happening. Only a few minutes before, I had been fixing dinner for Daddy and my younger brother, Nate, listening to an old Bob Wills record, and wondering if the coming storm would bring rain. I was thinking about leaving again—having that fantasy where I packed Mama’s old suitcase and went . . . somewhere. The dream always came wrapped in a tissue-paper layer of guilt so that I couldn’t see the contents clearly. Perhaps that was a merciful thing, because I knew Daddy and Nate couldn’t get by without me.

I heard branches slapping against the house as if the oak tree knew about the dream and was angry. Outside the window, a car sped by, a black Mercedes going too fast on the gravel, like it was running from something. It fishtailed back and forth on the curve, throwing rocks against the yard fence before it straightened and rushed onward.

Probably one of those doctors or lawyers leaving the resort on the lake,
I thought.
Probably doesn’t want his high-dollar car to get wet. They should stick to the paved roads where they belong.

The car disappeared down Good Hope Road, and the wind came up, roaring like a freight train. Hail pounded the roof, and debris whipped through the air, crashing into the house and barn.

When I ran to the screen door, the sky was swirling like a giant black cauldron. I watched as the cone of the tornado slowly separated from the ground and disappeared into the sky. Not a half mile away, a wall of rain was falling, but at our house, the hail stopped suddenly. The roar faded, and destruction lay everywhere—pieces of wood and metal, tree branches, shredded furniture, torn clothing, shards of glass glittering like diamonds in the afternoon sunlight.

Bits of paper floated from the churning clouds, drifting, swirling, dancing, as if they had all the time in the world. They filled the sky like snow.

The air was so quiet I could hear the papers falling, rustling slightly against an eerie silence, like a battlefield after the battle, when only the corpses remain. I wondered where so much paper could have come from, and if it had been blown all the way from Poetry, three miles across the low hills.

The big oak tree in the yard moaned, its limbs heavy with a crusty coating of fresh hail. I stared at the ice, then turned around in disbelief, looking at our single-story brick house and seeing everything as it had always been—the peeling paint, the overgrown bushes, the torn window screen where Nate sneaked out of his bedroom at night.