Dear Reader,
A Colorado author and essayist, Patricia Raybon writes daring and exciting novels at the intersection of faith and race, and she's this week's guest author.
Patricia's devotional writing appears in 'Our Daily Bread,' where she's a regular contributor. She also authors the Annalee Spain Mysteries, a "history mystery" series featuring a young Black theologian who solves crime during Colorado's dangerous 1920s Klan years. She has won both the Christy Award and the Christianity Today Book of the Year award for her fiction. A former newspaper journalist and journalism faculty member at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Patricia and her husband, Dan, a retired educator, have two grown daughters.
Patricia's latest book in the Annalee Spain series is Truth Be Told: On a lovely June night in 1924, amateur detective Annalee Spain is mingling bravely at a high-class political fundraiser in the lush backyard garden of famed political fixer, Cooper Coates, one of the wealthiest men in Denver's Black neighborhood of Five Points. When Coates's young daughter discovers a pretty stranger dead in her father's garden shed, Annalee is thrust onto the baffling new case just as she's reeling from another recent discovery-a handwritten letter, found buried in her own garden, that reveals the identity of her mother.
Meet Patricia at: patriciaraybon.com and contact her via: https://www.patriciaraybon.com/contact/
Please welcome back to the book club author Patricia Raybon…
On Staying Planted
They bounce. A little showy perhaps, but never too much. Our lilac bushes, after this winter, sported their bumper harvest with grace–waving at the wind with their fragrant, lovely branches. The flowers were so lush and sweet-smelling they seemed too grand for our humble Colorado backyard.
I grabbed my phone and took a video. Friends and family loved it.
The bigger news, however, wasn't our lilacs' beauty. It was their backstory.
Or, can you say lawn guy? A man with an ax? We'd only known him a year, far less than the 27 years since we'd planted the lilacs--by faith, of course. Lilac plantings are little more than sticks. Five little sticks, in our case. Sad-looking twigs, they offer only straggly roots as promise of the greenery that, at some point, might grow.
Indeed, I'd never grown lilacs. I just fondly recalled them from childhood. Every Denver yard seemed to ripple with lilac clusters. Lilacs adore full sun, and Colorado gets oodles of it. Walking to school with neighborhood pals, I'd tempt fate--and grouchy homeowners--by running across yards with daring friends to plant my face in lilac blossoms, breathing in the luscious scent.
Now a grownup myself, looking to landscape a small yard with my husband, I'd walked into a garden center and saw "lilacs." Yep, those sticks. Dan and I bought five, planting them along our back fence, spaced about three feet apart.
Then we stood back and let them grow. We never fussed. Never fertilized. We pruned only once. But those lilacs thrived. By age 27, they were tall, lush, and showy. Out came my phone. Photos galore. Then came our lawn guy.
Hardworking and earnest, he offered one summer day to trim our lilacs. Sure, I said, leaving him to it. An hour later, I came out back and wilted. Our lilacs were stubs. Five sticks. "What happened!" I cried.
He waved away my worry. "They'll be fine."
They weren't. Three years went by with barely a blossom. Powdery mildew struck. Then one year they perked up. Taller. More blooms. This year they truly shone. And to think I'd considered digging them all up and tossing them out as yard trash.
But they just needed time--to rebound. And for me to trust that God isn't finished with them yet.
The same is true, I suppose, for all of us. Some years may look bare and barren. But stay planted.
A lush harvest of grace and beauty is close at hand.
-- Patricia Raybon
https://www.patriciaraybon.com/contact/
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
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