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Reader Group Questions
The seedling for Tending Roses was planted along with a flower bed my grandmother and I tilled ten years ago. As we worked, she gave instructions about simple things-- how to wind the roots around an iris bulb, how to prune the branches on a rose bush, how to cut the blooms without harming the plant.
Halfway through planting the garden, we had to go inside because my newborn son became cranky in his stroller nearby. Taking him from me, Grandma settled into a rocking chair, bundling him on her shoulder, patting his back just lightly, quieting him with a special sort of grandma magic. Closing her eyes, she rocked slowly back and forth, and told me a story of her life, and her flower bed, and the lessons she learned there.
Something profound happened to me when my grandmother finished that story. I understood so much about her and about myself that I had never considered before. I had an almost painful sense of life passing by. I had a sense of life being not just a trip from here to there, but a journey with lots of good stuff, maybe the best stuff, in the middle. I realized that I was so focused on goals down the road, that I was missing the value of where I was.
The idea to include my grandmother's stories in a fiction novel came a few years later, at a time when I was beginning to feel a strong sense of meaning in my life. I think Tending Roses grew out of a need to communicate that process of soul searching. I had a strong desire to create something that had a sense of goodness to it, where good people do the right thing, and are blessed as a result.
Click the book cover to read the first chaper of Tending Roses.
Click on the book to read the first chapter of Tending Roses
