Today is Good Friday, the day we commemorate Jesus’s trial, crucifixion, and burial 2000 years ago. Amazing, really, that such a long-ago event remains so central in our lives. Good Friday was not good, but with the belief in Christian doctrine, a necessary one. The “good” of Good Friday is incongruous unless viewed in what it heralds…on Sunday He rose.

You know I see “signs” everywhere. I relate to words of poet Mary Oliver, who wrote And mostly I’m grateful that I take this world so seriously.

I can’t help it. There has to be meaning in everything.

In New Hampshire the snow lingers to the point of exasperation. It’s mid-April and last week I was driving through a snow storm! But a day later I spotted it – the bright red of the rhubarb poking through the brown dead earth.

I was reminded of how I received this rhubarb. It was a surprise gift. Thank you, Tamar. She was sad. She was thinking of Heather. She felt a wreck. To top it off, she had killed her beloved rhubarb plant. Actually, she only thought she had. Hark! One day, growing out of her own dead brown earth was a baby shoot of scarlet red.

“Suddenly,” she said, “it was as if I heard Heather’s commanding voice behind me – ‘SEE! LIFE GOES ON!'”

Tamar dug up a piece of the rhubarb root, got in her car, and drove to my house. She gave me the tiny plant and said I was not capable of killing it. Indeed, I neglect it and still it grows. It has become a yearly reminder: after the winter, spring always come. Life goes on.

Easter Sunday is Cassie’s birthday. She would have been 38. In June it will be three years since we very unexpectedly lost her. I tried to reread the post I wrote and found I could not. I also hesitate on my word choice – “lost.”

Yes, “Good Friday” was a tragic day and yet it made possible to have “Good News” – that Jesus Christ would rise again. Because of this, we too, will rise again. It is both incredibly implausible and absolutely believable.

I find it significant, or perhaps only comforting, that this Easter weekend is Cassie’s birthday – and not the anniversary of her death.

She is gone from this earth, but she is not lost to us. She is there. Here.

Happy Easter, friends. What GOOD NEWS we’ve been given.

“Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver, Thirst

Dear friends,

It’s here.

All of GUINEVERE’S SECRETS, written by yours truly.

This is a companion guide to  THE UNFORGETTABLE GUINEVERE ST. CLAIR, where the true stories behind the fictional stories are revealed.

For instance:

Was this book inspired by true events? Was there really a burial? Did a gentle boy really kill the goose? What about that finger under the tractor?

The cow in the picture above? She was my dad’s…and yes, that WAS HER NAME.

CLICK HERE to subscribe and I will send Guinevere’s Secrets to your inbox right now! (If you’re already a newsletter subscriber, it should already be waiting for you – hooray!

Enjoy! It was a pleasure to write and revisit the many ways real life influenced this work of fiction.

Amy 

p.s. Know anyone who enjoyed Guinevere and would like to know her secrets? Please share this post or the above link – thank you thank you xoxoxoxo

Can’t wait to hear what you think!

“It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends.”

-Madeleine L’Engle

A Place For Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza

As an Indian family gathers for Hadia, the eldest sister’s wedding, parents Layla and Rafiq reflect on raising their children – what happened, what they wish they could take back, did they do their best?

This literary fiction novel announces Fatima Farheen Mirza as a major literary talent. FOR REAL. I marveled at Mirza’s ability to write from four different points of view without ever announcing who was speaking or from what time period – you just got it.

I grew up in the suburbs of Omaha, Nebraska. Next door lived the Huqs from Bangladesh. They were Muslim, we were Christian. The mothers of both families traded stories over watering the hostas in the garden. Kea Huq was strikingly beautiful with her long straight dark hair and beautiful salwars. She made her tiny gold nose ring incredibly classy. Of her arranged marriage, my mother asked, “Did you love him?” Kea answered, “Of course I did. He was my husband.” It’s been a lesson for us, I tell you.

In A PLACE FOR US, Hadia has balked Indian tradition and is marrying for love, though he is still a muslim and a man of Indian descent. Even with many personal cultural and religious differences, I found myself relating to so much of the thoughts and feelings of tradition, home, and belonging.

Amar is the youngest child and only son. He’s different. He just can’t do it right. He’s not as naturally school smart, dreams of being an artist, has a penchant for always pushing the envelope, wonders if there is even a God, and eventually turns to substances to cope. His mother and sisters are his protectors. His father loves him but doesn’t know how to deal with such a son. He has a temper.

There are secrets, there are betrayals, there is guilt that is hard to let go of. This is the story of every family, but told from a very unique point of view. I loved it.

By the end, Rafiq is sick. He’s an old man holding his arms out for his youngest child to come home. Will his beloved Amar ever return? Is there really a home for each of us to return to?

This story is a love story on many levels – between a husband and wife, between Hadia and Abbas who dies young, between Hadia and her chosen husband, and between Amar and the beautiful Amira who loves Amar but cannot watch him self-destruct – yet longing to be with him anyway.

There’s also the great love story of how much a mother and a father love their children, even when they cannot say it out loud. The mother, Layla thinks, “She was stunned and stunned again by them, and her love for them. How much had been lost? Never made it into her memory, never been captured in a photograph?”

Oh, my heart.

I read this book more slowly than I usually read, forcing myself to slow down and enjoy each sentence – you’ll want to. The writing is at once reflective, aching, and beautifully constructed.

Half the pages of my book are turned down so I can go back and reread sentences – aspiring and inspired to write as wondrously as Mirza does.

Have I convinced you? Read this book. It’s tremendous.

It’s Maple Season in New Hampshire!

“One of the great innovators of our time, Steve Jobs of Apple, had this insight: ‘you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.’

…Don’t get overwhelmed by the many large, difficult tasks of life. If you commit to doing the “easy” things – the “small” things God asks you to do – and you do them as perfectly as you can, big things will follow.

In a sense, your small and simple sacrifices are the dots of daily living that make up the masterpiece painting of your life. You may not see how the dots connect now, and you don’t need to yet. Simply have faith enough for the moment you are living in now. Trust in God, and ‘out of small things [will come] that which is great.'”

-Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Some times you just need a break from the typical news cycle of doom and gloom. Here’s something to lift our spirits: my daughter as exhibit A:Cope is a missionary in Taiwan. She LOVES pho (yum yum!) Do you know what she’s holding?

A chicken’s comb!

Let’s get a closer look. Exhibit B: I see…feathers. And you know what she did with the chicken comb? SHE ATE IT.

This is what Google says about a chicken comb: “A comb is a fleshy growth or crest on the top of the head of gallinaceous birds, such as turkeys, pheasants, and domestic chickens. … The comb may be a reliable indicator of health or vigor and is used for mate-assessment in some poultry species.”

Mmmm to fleshy growths! (where is the vomit emoji?)

Missionary Cope also writes (and this is really the good news of the week!):

This admissions scandal highlights a problem that’s been going on a for a long time – and it makes me so so angry.

You know that quote? “Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.”

As a mom of one graduate and another graduating this year, this admissions cheating and deception hits very close to home.

I am well aware that I, myself, write from a position of privilege. I have had opportunities that few in the world have had simply because I was born in America. I’m white. I come from a middle class family who valued education and could help me pay for it. I went to an incredible college-bound high school.

But I’ll tell you what. I had parents who were fairly hands-off. I wrote my own essays. I didn’t have the advantage of “knowing people in high places.” My parents weren’t in the position to donate heavily to the alumni fund. No one wrote my essays. The chips fell where they did. I was wait-listed at my first choice school. I still went to college – and realized a few things along the way. No one was going to make life happen for me.

Thank you, parents, for not making it too easy.

As my son waits on his last school today, my heart aches a little bit – what will it be?  The chips will fall and he will deal.

The extent to how far we will go for our children can be a very slippery slope. I want so very very badly for all of my children “to succeed!” and I sometimes do too much for them, forgetting that the struggle is GOOD.

And, as my wise mother says – “they are COMPLETELY missing the point of what an education really is.”

Photoshopping faces onto legit athlete’s faces (this scandal also highlights the great value of athletics over, say, an amazing violinist or, say, a student who does an extraordinary amount of community service…) bribing SAT and ACT proctors…

This is WRONG.

So it’s all bad. It’s really really bad. As I try to see the big picture of this landscape, I’m thinking of what this scandal is really highlighting: the great anxiety we have over getting into “the right college” and how we apparently are not willing to let our children “fail.”

Those who can pay, often do. And it continues to create an incredibly unfair advantage. It’s immoral. It’s deceitful and goes way beyond even writing your kid’s college essay, bombarding the admissions department, or securing a top-notch recommendation from an influential person.

So the richer get richer b/c they get into the “best” schools and make higher wages out of school. Class distinctions grow wider. For minorities, for non-athletes, for low-income students, for kids working really really hard, for those with great character but no “outstanding thing” – are put at an even more of a disadvantage.

I read this today: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Matthew 16:26.

Said slightly differently:

“What goes around comes around.”

“We will all get our just reward.”

But in the meantime, how about this: what kind of world do we want to live in?

What kind of life do we really want to create for our children?

Don’t mistake making your children’s life EASIER as a good thing. Stop the comparing! Don’t be so concerned with creating an exceptional child that you forget you already have one.

Let’s be better. Let’s BE GOOD. I think we live at a time where it takes a considerable amount of bravery to be good. Have courage to do the right thing when it seems like there’s no reward for it. There is. We will get our just reward. We will keep our souls.