Here’s my latest blog post about Revelation and my latest WNIJ post about a lonely chicken.
Thank you for following me here, but I’ve moved over to Katie Andraski. Scroll down a bit you’ll see a box to subscribe to my blog there.
Here is my latest blog post http://wp.me/p5BlDo-jAq. I’m not longer working out of this blog, as I’ve upgraded my site. So if you’d like to continue to hear about what I’m doing, please sign up over there. Thank you so much for finding and reading my writing.
Katie
I wanted to let you know that I’ve moved my website to http://www.katieandraski.com. Even though that’s the same address as before, I don’t think you were able to come along with me. I’d love to have you continue to follow me over there. I’ve got a new post up: http://katieandraski.com/teachers-text-print/ you might be interested in reading. You can sign up at the bottom of each page and on the side of this post.
I’ve been admiring the websites Hal Fickett has made for the last year. I felt it was time to upgrade. I hope to see you over there.
Thank you for your support.
Katie
The moon rose exultant and carried me into joy. Now I don’t feel joy too often, but I did this night, so much so I tossed the hay bag over the stall wall and tipped my bucket of water across the floor. Bruce left. But I photographed Tessie standing in the door, head down, pimping me for treats. I stepped back with the phone up to my face and try to frame her and the moon just for fun, for Facebook. I think about the old saying Behold I stand at the door and knock and I see this mare standing at the door and waiting for me to make up her stall for the night, to spend time with her. Somehow she’s gotten bigger, like a stallion might, with more presence and power. Her coat bristles in the cold. She is very old as in ancient, as in cave paintings old, but I can touch my hand to her flank and she will step aside. She has walked away from hay and asked me to spend time, but I don’t. My hands hurt when I pull them from my gloves to unlatch gates or buckets, to feed treats, feel their lips on my palm.
On the way back inside I wanted to run along the shadows and hug Orion standing there, more reserved this night, not offering to take me up, but I didn’t care.
These bitter cold days, so dangerous, I could die out there if I make a mistake, make me feel alive and grateful even though the spigot on the house freezes and I have to haul buckets up the stairs from the basement. (I don’t want to water my horses with soft water. I don’t want to risk the change.) Every time I carry buckets up the stairs, my knees ache and I hope the stairs don’t collapse. I carry my phone in case they do. My hay bags have frozen solid. They take so much time stuff, and my fingers chill down to the bone, that I take them to the basement to dry. I reach in my pocket for my pink jack knife to cut open a hay bale but it’s not there. I figure I lost it somewhere in the hay or out in the paddock when I reached for treats. I use scissors to cut the baling twine and toss flakes to the mares.
Some guy on Facebook says we come more alive when we hurt, when our tasks challenge us, when we push our bodies to the extreme. I think he’s right every time the bitter air hits my face, slaps me into a thank you for being able to walk the dogs on the road, and haul water, and go inside to a warm shower, that soaks heat almost to my bones.
Then the sun comes, warms the kitchen through the window. Better yet, warms the spigot, even though the air burns my face and throat when I walk the dogs. I fill five buckets for evening chores mid morning, so I can avoid the basement. Bruce helps with giving the mares their pellets. I say, “Keep an eye out for my knife.” “It’s on the hay bale. I found it in the alfalfa bag.” Now that’s a good day. For sure I wasn’t going to find it until the snow melted and it would be rusted shut like other lost tools. The moon has started to look like a lazy eye as it rises.
But today, today was brutal with hard driving wind and snow, enough of it, to stretch drifts like taffy across my walk to the barn. All I wanted all day was a warm shower but I have work to do. Onyx asks repeatedly to go out. He shakes his paw on the porch and looks across the yard, then turns to come back inside.
I drove to work for the first time in a month, the snow flying across the road, so full of joy. My Honda Civic sliced through the moving sheets, the pavement dry and icy underneath. On the way home the snow has kicked up enough to make sun dogs to the north and south, bright luminous sun dogs.
Bruce says it’s been a hard week battling the cold, and the hard drive down this road, where black ice slips across the road and drivers will pass like you are standing still, especially in the blind spots. I tell him I’m sorry and resolve to work harder around here.
This is linked up at Unforced Rhythms.
If you’d like to check out my novel, it is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Books A Million and in all the ebook formats.
Photo by WNIJ’s Andrew Epstein
Dan Klefstad of WNIJ looks like he sounds, tall, lanky, with a very kind voice that sounds the same in person as it does on the radio. He met us in the parking lot on a brisk morning because the building was locked for holiday break. Bruce and I were five minutes late and Dan’s cheeks looked a little smacked from the cold, though he said the cold keeps him awake. He’d been at the station since 4 am. As he walked Bruce and I to the door of the studio I couldn’t get over this–his voice sounded the exact same as he does on the radio. He reminds me of a the beautiful yellow pine floor in our upstairs–smooth, sturdy, with knots that only add character. He’s a tall drink of water. We walked downstairs, concrete on either side, stepping into office space that reminded me of a bunker. He pointed out the lounge area, the restrooms, other studios. I met other announcers, whose names have slipped by me because I was getting terribly close to that microphone, to the surprise of Dan’s questions. (Dan later told me they were Guy Stephens and Jenna Dooley. Guy is WNIJ’s arts reporter and Jenna does All Things Considered.) “This is my first interview for the book,” I said. They seemed surprised, but they said they discovered new writers, one of whom was featured as a best book for Chicago Book Reviews. Jenna said she thought the book was a winner because it kept turning and surprising her as she read. Ah there is hope.
Photo by Megan, Community Organizer, Sycamore Barnes and Noble.
Interviews and readings have given me the fear. Readings because I didn’t know who would show up and I didn’t know what part of this thirty year story I should tell or how to tease my audience enough that they’d want to read my book. I was most worried about what I’d read and have been worried about my mind giving way when asked a difficult question. My first reading was for professors at NIU and I needed to come up with something formal. I worked to place the story in context of history as I understood it. I sweated that one, but the other two readings went well, especially the one in DeKalb.
Photo by Dan Klefstad
Dan threw me a few questions I didn’t know how to answer or that I may have answered too honestly. When he asked how Christian publishing has changed, I’ve said I don’t really know. I do know my publisher asked if there were swear words in the book because Spring Arbor, an evangelical distributor was interested in carrying the book. I told my publisher it’s not so much swearing that would be trouble, but I don’t want to silence what I have come to believe about gay marriage, hell, even the second coming. I told Dan how I’ve seen how that market can be mean, even back in the early 80’s when an author said she listened to angels. But there are good people there, who are doing something to help the world, and I wish we could build bridges to them.
His first questions had me stumbling, saying um a lot and I wondered how this conversation would ever sound good, though he can work magic with editing. I was glad this was not live. The microphone looked like a balloon in my face and I looked back at Dan’s script, in 18 point and wondered where he’d lead me. What did he see in the book? (I’ve been blind to the book. I have welcomed any insight my readers offer.) I relaxed when I read my excerpt from the second chapter. My web excerpt opens the novel, though I wish I’d read from a section a little farther into the book, where my characters are looking at the family gravesite and Janice’s father wants to sell the farm. There is another theme in this book, how children left with an inheritance can’t handle it. Seems like one feels they deserve the most.
Dan asked if the part about Janice not believing the authors she promoted was true to my experience. “Yes, yes it is,” I replied. It was based on my work with Frank and Francis Schaeffer. “I’d tell my journalist friends that these guys were fomenting revolution and they said the best thing I could do was promote them, keep their movement from being secret, where it might gain power.” I admitted that Frank and his dad knew I wasn’t a true believer, but here I was getting them stories in Newsweek and an interview on the Today show so they kept me around.
How did you leave Christian publishing? “Well, I was fired because I asked an author what kind of work he did. When they said we were through, I told them that I wasn’t into promoting fear and hate. One of their manuscripts terrified me with nightmares of coyotes snarling. How I began teaching? My horse took me back to a community college because I needed to support him.”
When we were finished he had recorded 25 minutes of material. “No one has complained about me making them look bad,” he said. “Could you reread a paragraph in the second excerpt?” I said though instead of through. Now, I’ve got a little anticipation like Christmas. What will he chose out of our conversation? How will it sound? And a little regret that I didn’t take out my iPhone and take pictures of him, like he took of me.
This will air Monday, February 9 at 6:52 and 8:52 am. After that the seven minute interview will be available as a podcast on WNIJ’s website.
When I think of a well, I think of the big round stone that sat outside my brother’s room on the farm in New York. It looks like a millstone and was laid before end loaders were even a thought. There is a round hole in the middle, that used to be plugged by a red well pump. I’ve looked down at the water reflecting and wondered about the mystery of being at the bottom of a well and looking up and seeing stars in broad daylight.
On our farm we have two wells, one for the house and one for the barn. A few years ago, a drought sucked the barn well dry. The well guy tried to push the pipe deeper but said rock stopped him. That’s the hardest well to replenish. He said people in town had lost their wells and we started hauling water from the house. I use a radio flyer to squeeze three buckets that I roll and slosh over to the barn. Bruce faithfully checks to see if the heat stays on in the pump house. I’ve pulled the spigot a couple times to see what we get, and the water has come. But when I’ve set it out on a warm summer day, it’s turned bilious. I’m afraid to water them and have been too lazy to call the health department to test it. So I tip a bucket under the spigot, open it and listen for the water. It is here that Onyx allowed himself to be touched. He’d hop on the hay bale and dip his head for me to stroke it.
When I think about writing, I think about it like a well filling. Sometimes sentences have come to me and I have tried not to think them until I can get to the page and give their very faint whispers a voice. My writing well, too, has gone dry. Three times, maybe four, I can recall it going still. This has been hard when I have drawn my identity from being a writer, from this call to write. The first time came after Howard Nemerov advised I give up poetry take up farming. The second time came after spending a few years, staying up to the wee hours of the morning, writing, because that’s what I knew to do–write. That was my call, so I wrote. Foolishly I showed the rough, raw manuscript to someone who said I needed to learn how to write. I needed to work through the book scene by scene. He didn’t have much encouragement. I took the train to New York to pick up the manuscript and smiled wanly at him. I stretched out on my couch and slept, my dreams doing the work my pen could not. The third time was after we moved to our farm. I’d written about three long drafts of stories in a few year’s time. I’d tightened my novel and sent it out one last time, the editors and agents saying, it’s not quite what we were looking for in hand signed notes. Each of these times I was so spent, it didn’t matter if I wrote again.
Recently I read in a Tweetspeak Poetry newsletter: The Best in Poetry: This Months Top Ten Poetic Picks about how we can be too productive. “The Japanese have defined a form of death-from-productivity: karōshi. Karōshi is when you are so productive your heart or head break and you bleed to death inside yourself. Conversely, if those organs have persisted but the mind has not, karōshi can become karojisatsu: suicide from overwork.” L.W. Lindquist was quoting “Against Productivity:This Essay Took Four Years to Write“. This make sense to me, because sometimes you need to be still, you need to leave the well alone so it can fill up. You need to waste time. The writer says, “Wisdom takes time. It takes staring out into the rain, It takes service to others. It takes getting nothing done to make us human again. To see the connections between things requires studying the blank spaces between them, days that slip into boredom and loneliness with only a person and their senses and their imagination to keep them company.”
We’ve not tapped our well for the horses for a good two years. We’ve opened the spigot a few times but the water has turned green in the sunlight. But it’s time now, to get the well tested and possibly shocked so the mares and chickens can drink the water. And so I don’t have to pull buckets from the house to the barn in my radio flyer.
*****
If you would like to read more of my writing, The River Caught Sunlight is on sale as an ebook for .99 for the Kindle, Nook, iBooks, and Kobo until the end of December, 2014. It is also on sale as a print book at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Books a Million. (The print book is also on sale.)
Wake up. Wake up. Stay awake because “you do not know when the Lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at midnight, or at cock crow, or in the morning. May he not come suddenly and find you asleep. What I say to you, I say to all: stay awake.” –Mark 13:33-37
Richard Rohr wrote about this in his meditation for Monday, December 10. He urged us to get away from a fear based interpretation of this passage. He doesn’t think it means we should tremble at Jesus return to earth or that our death could catch up to us at any time and we’d better be ready, or else. He says it doesn’t mean “…Jesus is saying,’You’d better do it right, or I’m going to get you’…”
This fear based Christianity has seeped into my soul so deep it runs along my bones. I was a toddler when I heard thunder from the preacher’s mouth: If you were the only person who sinned, Jesus would have been tortured to save you, just you. If the communists came to your church and held up a gun, shouting, “Renounce Jesus or live,” what would you do? If a person dies without walking the aisle, accepting Jesus into their heart, they will go to hell. You don’t want them to ask at judgement why didn’t you tell me? One of the first things I remember is the picture I made for sin: a black icicle.
I’ve eased away from much of this, but the residue, pretty thick, remains. It saps my joy. I look over my shoulder wondering if people, if God love me like they say they do. I know I can’t even make it to the basics of following Jesus: feed the poor, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner. I’m weary of the challenge, the never being enough, no matter how much I bless my enemy. I just want to find my way to joy, to gratitude for the good things I’ve been given.
Sometimes the pain wells up so I pack it with reading Facebook first thing, last thing, in between thing in my day. I think bad thoughts–thoughts welling up from my fear–I ruminate, and rumination leads to no good thing except losing a day to sadness or worry or frustration. So instead I lose whole days by sliding statuses, clicking articles on my phone. My good thoughts move away like horses to the far end of the pasture. Sometimes the fence breaks and I lose them, even though I live in a place that pleads with me to come, look, really look, and hear and smell and taste and feel with my skin and soul.
One morning the moon was rising in the east, a thin sliver and Orion was throwing his hip over the horizon in the west. Smoke billowed from Byron, the nuke plant. The stars ranged overhead, clear as you’d see them in the Adirondacks. The horses waited in the barn. I thought to myself why, why don’t I come out, here now, while the day is edging towards dawn, when the film between this world and the other thins?
One evening, the sun was gone, but the sky glowed. I poured old, hay scattered water out on the grass. Both mares watched me behind the gate. And late, late, when I walked the dogs the last time, I walked into the field, the ground rising up to my feet, almost as if it were breathing, my ankles wobbling, as I watched the lopsided moon, orange, hanging in the eastern sky, the Pleiades bleared above me. Think, think on this as you go to sleep, I thought.
Sometimes it can be too much to bear. Too much, so I stay inside.
Rohr continues in his meditation, “You see, Christ is always coming; God is always present. It’s we who aren’t! We’re always somewhere else, at least I often am. Jesus tells us to be conscious, to be awake, to be alert, to be alive. It’s the key to all spirituality, because that is the one thing we aren’t. Be honest. Most of us live on cruise control. We just go through the motions of our daily routines. We wake up and we repeat what we did the day before, and we’re upset if there are any interruptions.”
I do see. Christ does come when Night picks up his toy and prances, looking at me with bright eyes. Play with me, he says. I reach down and he turns his head. We dance a bit as I pretend to grab for it. Old dog Booker bows and hops after it if I toss it. But I don’t lose myself in the game. I’m not good at play.
Christ comes when Onyx hops into my lap while I’m planning my classes, nudging himself into my lap. Or when he jumps on the bed, knowing I’m awake and dips his head into my hands for petting, his smooth black coat, reaching to my hand.
He comes when Tessie drops her head to the floor, ears forward, saying look, look. And when we are walking along the trail and I have to drop into my body all the way to my toes in order to feel her body, to feel what she is telling me.
He comes when Morgen reaches around and grabs my treat bag, yanks it, because I’m somewhere else in my head and she is reminding me to come back, to come present. It comes when she stops while we’re driving, all the way up front, she feels my mind go blank through the reins. And I have to come back to feeling her in my hands, and watching her body, and speaking to her, telling her how good she’s being. All the while the world around us radiates glory.
He comes when Bruce hops out of the carriage to stand by Morgen’s head, show her that the chaotic barnyard is nothing to be afraid of. He comes when Bruce opens his arm to me in the morning or evening or at noonday and draws me up close.
***
If you’d like to read more of my writing, my novel, The River Caught Sunlight is available on sale for $.99 until the end of December at the following places: iBooks, Kindle, and Nook. It is also available in paperback from Barnes and Noble, Amazon and Books A Million.
Not to sound cheesy or anything but ebook version of The River Caught Sunlight has just dropped in price to $.99. That’s less than a dollar. If you’ve been curious about my book but holding off, here’s your chance to purchase a copy for less than a dollar. Click on the following links: Kindle or Nook or ibooks to purchase a book.
Of course the print version is available at: Barnes and Noble, Amazon and Books a Million.
Photo by Russell Mothkovich
When I looked at this picture and looked again, I saw a woman with a cavern gaping inside her, and not one full of crystals that is so hot humans can only visit with oxygen suits on, no not that one. The cave I’m talking about is simple, full of moss, and a trickle of water that carved it, and the smell of rock and dirt. Rock has grown from the ceiling to the floor, the floor to the ceiling. There is no light.
It is the cavern that my aunt talked about when she said “Your need is too great” when my brother died and I was grieving. I had confronted her sister for not taking time to talk to me on the phone, for not making another time, in a letter that was a scream of grief. She felt she needed to rebuke me with the lie, that haunts me like a demon, when I have slipped into darkness, and have sidle up to the Jesus Prayer for survival: Lord be merciful to me a sinner.
If a person’s need were too great, Jesus wouldn’t be separating sheep from goats on whether we give a cup of water to the thirsty. Parker Palmer says that sometimes if we can’t help we can trust the community to step in, to fill the need. This is true. It is something I have seen happen when I could not help. I see now, I see how this is merely my aunt’s comment on herself, that her need was too great to offer even something small, a kind greeting, a note sending love. Being one with this gaping need, I tell you, that a note, a kind word, something that might seem like no big deal, can count for everything.
The cave I’m talking about is a hollow cupped in a mountain, holding space in the middle of rock, the weight so heavy we can’t fathom it bearing down, but still, still the hollow remains, and maybe a trickle of water.
But then can’t that emptiness, that deep insecurity, that place where the sun doesn’t shine, be turned into a good thing? Christians have been saying from the beginning that we must be emptied, poured out, we must take ourselves out of the way, so that God can sweep in, his light shine, from us. Can’t we climb into this emptiness, into its mystery and make something more whole than we are?
My brother used to crawl belly down through caves, his carbide lamp flickering. He invited me once to crawl through a hole barely larger than my hips, to find a big open room on the other side. No, I said. I stayed where I could see the light above and the ladder leading out. But I have crawled through my own tight, dark spaces, a lamp flickering against the rock and I have seen some things.
I think of the woman-at-the-well story, where the teacher comes and sees in a flash she’s there alone, not part of the chattering group of women who come daily to draw water. He sees in her face the several men she’s thumbed through to find that long drink of water that satisfies. He says what he sees with such gentleness she feels known that I imagine was not unlike how I felt when I asked a realtor to look for homes and her first listing, was exactly where we’d want to live. How’d you know me? I asked. This woman too asked the same. She was surprised he’d even speak to her, an ostracized woman from an outsider town.
That hollow deep inside her, he promised would spring and dance with living water, rushing and flooding, and living crystal. All she’d have to do was come and drink.
______
Here is a blog post by Winn Collier that speaks to this dark season and gave me the courage to post this: http://winncollier.com/groan-first-week-of-advent/. And here is another one by Beth Harrison Hess:http://jasonandkelliwoodford.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-person-i-used-to-be.html. She also wrote about fountains that reminded me, that caves can be fountains: http://t.co/dOnj2quEYt.
If you like to read more of my words, The River Caught Sunlight is on sale for $ .99 as an ebook at Kindle, Nook and ibooks through the month of December. It also available in print at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Books A Million.
I’m linking this at Kelli Woodford’s place where you’ll find some gorgeous writing.
CHAPTER ONE
January, 1983. Coeymans, New York
Janice Westfahl saw rather than heard pop, pop, pop, a stitching of pops going off, small puffs of smoke. The rock wall crumpled, then shimmered to the ground. Dust billowed and bellied into the air. A few seconds later she heard thunder that would have frightened her if she’d heard it on a clear summer day because it meant a storm.
Pulverized, Janice thought of pulverized, the meaning of that word played out right before her eyes. A sheer side of a mountain dropped to the ground, blown to smithereens. And we all fall down. Wasn’t that the child’s game? Her classmates’ dresses billowed as they dropped to a crouch. That’s what the mountain looked like—a billow of rock, and piles like children flopped on the ground. The cliff that was left over was the awesome kind, sheer, wiping the air with rock.
She leaned into Caleb, his arm around her, hugging her close. Her body rippled with the joy of being so close to this man who worked the ground. When they’d met she’d fallen in love with his big machines slowly, ever so slowly trundling over The Farm, turning over the dirt, beating the grasses, cutting them. Then she’d fallen for the companionable hours they’d spent riding in his tractors. And now he hauled rock in a quarry.
The whole time he’d been watching her reaction, his pale blue eyes studying her, but she couldn’t meet his eyes. She looked at the blue scar left by the explosion with no pity for the mountain that was being felled to repair the New York State Thruway.
“Up close those pebbles are car sized boulders,” he said.
“I’m glad I saw it,” Janice said. “You’re something to work there.” She’d not meant to fall in love, three years back. But his big machines—his tractor, his combine, the gizmos he used to break the earth—seduced her, though he’d been clear he was not the marrying kind.
“It makes ends meet.”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“Not particularly. They clear the site when they set the charges. The dynamite is worthless without blasting caps.”
“I couldn’t stand the noise.”
“They give us ear protection.”
“The phone is the loudest equipment that I’ll use,” Janice said quietly. In two days she would be leaving for her job at Godspeed Books, a publishing company outside of Chicago. Her job would be to connect the company and its authors with the national and Christian media. She’d have some power bringing national attention to her authors and their books.
“Let’s get married.” Caleb’s voice sounded raspy as wind blowing through dried grass over the top of stale, crusty snow. He tipped her chin up, so she had to meet his eyes. They reminded her of puddles reflecting the sky. He just didn’t let her see into them.
“Sure.” Janice squinted. Her heart was beating fast. The man she’d loved because the light fell on him, because he was beautiful and took her up in his tractor, was actually asking her to marry her. Sure, she’d rather learn how to drive the big machines than wheel and deal outside of Chicago. Sure.
Caleb drew her to him, his lips electric against hers, his beard scratching her. He smelled like baking corn, and she felt surrounded by his passion, her own passion bubbling like a spring.
“Don’t leave,” he whispered, his eyes still shut. Something vulnerable about his face she’d never seen before.
“Aw Caleb,” Janice sighed. “Why now, why when I made a promise to take this job a thousand miles away?”
“My friends told me I was a fool to let you get away.” He wiped her hair off her face, even though her hair was short and didn’t need brushing aside.
“I thought you weren’t the marrying kind. You’ve been clear about that.” He’d stood her up when they’d made a date the first summer. She blamed herself for coming on too strong and promised they could be friends. Just friends had been fine as long as she could ride behind him on the tractor during the summers when she was home. He looked out the window. The dust was settling.
“People change.”
“Caleb I love you. I’ve always loved you.”
“You too,” he said.
“Let’s set a date. Maybe a year from now, so I could get some experience in my job and look for something back here. What about Christmas? Then you won’t have to worry about remembering our anniversary.” Janice tumbled over herself.
“Whatever makes you happy,” Caleb said, a little resigned.
After he shifted into gear and was driving down the highway, he laid her hand on his thigh and rubbed his thumb over the top. Her hand felt so soft between the hardness of his leg and hand. She thought how those legs braced him as he picked up bales of hay, the strings boring into his palms, even through his leather gloves. He’d toss the fifty pound bales to the top of the stack like they were nothing and set them on edge so air could circulate, letting the heat that built up ease out of the green hay.
“I’ll pick you up tomorrow at one. We can go to a motel,” he said just before she got out of the car. He tried to make it sound like the joke it had always been. Janice looked at the red siding on her parents’ house and the white shutters. The Little Barn towered alongside them.
I’d like that.” Janice wasn’t sure she was ready to make love because she believed what the Bible said about waiting until marriage, but it would be nice to be alone with him without either one of their mothers in the next room.
Besides he’d teased her about going to a motel for the last three years. She’d said yes, no, maybe and they’d laughed it off. He’d always said he didn’twant to blow her mind because he knew how innocent she was. But this was different. Caleb held her against him, too strong for her to pull away. He kissed her hard on the lips and released her. She was about to say she loved him again, when he put his finger on her lips, the dirt worked into the lines. “Tomorrow then.” Janice nodded, his finger rubbing across her lips, she was so full of pleasure and dared not say anything. She walked unsteadily to the house. At the door, she waved as he pulled away.
If you’d like to find out what happens next, The River Caught Sunlight ebooks are on sale until the end of November for $1.99 in the Kindle, Nook and ibook editions. It is also available in softcover at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Books A Million.
Sometimes a person has to leave home, even if that home is the most marvelous place she's ever lived, even if her mother will be diagnosed with terminal cancer, and her beloved farmer, a man she's loved for years asks her to marry him.
Katie Andraski's Ground 