A story has power. It can touch the heart in deep and meaningful ways, sometimes more than a piece of non-fiction does. I grew up in the Old Country, with old stories, with Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm Brothers. My sister and I made up stories at bedtime and took turns spinning tales as we fell asleep. Giant elves and tiny giants, talking animals, and cyclopses lived in deep dark forests. Princess were rescued and evil witches died in fires. Hearts sometimes turned into stone and melted again with love, just before all seemed lost. I love a good fairy tale and an allegory. They help me relate – sometimes deep in my heart where words cannot go.

Over these last couple of years I have told myself a story. Many times I have tweaked and rewrote the still evolving events. Life shows up in this story and this story shows up in life. So, I continue to write it, search for its meaning as I go through the mundane of my day to day.

I would love to introduce you to Isabella, share with you from her journey to Forever Mountain. Maybe it will lift your spirit, help you hold on to hope while you are in your valley.

Here is the preface of

The Grief Garden

Beware

“I once loved morning glory. I was ignorant. I should have let my husband kill them while he was spraying the weed-killer. But no. I had to throw out precautions while he was getting rid of the weeds along the fence.

“Be careful not to mess with the flower shoots,” I said. How stupid.

How I wish he would not have listened to me. He should have murdered them all. I looked dreamy eyed at those deceiving, heart-shaped leaves and was elated about their sheer number. I was utterly disillusioned in my visions of a “Secret Garden”, in my hopes for a place where vines would grow and purple blossoms pop up on the chain link fence, shielding a fruitful and quiet paradise.

Instead, every year during Holy Week, when I head out into a cold spring after the ground has thawed, I am hit with their cruel reality. While I prune the berry shrubs and clip back the thorny branches of the gooseberry, I realize how much I despise the dried tendrils which have twisted around everything. No matter how much I have trained the morning glory during the previous year to only grow along the fence, their speck-like seeds permeate my garden. Like obedient tiny soldiers, they pop up everywhere and choke out my fruit.

I don’t know why happenstances, once promising and full of hope turn and why it’s so hard to grow fruit. What I do know is that I want to warn you with this little story. It’s not a new tale, nor is it mine, because every story has been told before; every warning has been given, too. I simply want to alert you to the fact that dangers lurk in your garden. You see, evil hides everywhere, and mostly down deep, away from light. Please know that your garden too, no matter how hard you have tried to tend it, might instantly turn into a grief-garden.

Beware! And don’t say you haven’t been warned.”