A Believer's Journal

I am excited to announce that I have now published my first novel. It is entitled, “Mary Laing.”

While crossing the Atlantic in a wooden packet in 1855, Mary Laing writes a series of letters to her stepdaughter, Frances “Fannie” Laing, left behind in Scotland. The letters provide an account of the traumatic voyage endured by Mary and her family, as well as chronicle Mary’s own emotional odyssey along the way.

Forty years later, Mary reads those same letters to her granddaughter, almost thirteen-year-old Jessie Laing, hoping the letters prove a salutary guide as she and Jessie make their own hazardous journey, navigating the ocean of their shared grief.

You may order the book from the Lulu bookstore: Mary Laing. The cost there is $25.00 plus $5.69 shipping and $1.38 taxes. Or you may order the book directly from me! I will sign it and ship it to you for $25 plus $5 shipping for up to two books. You may order one or more copies by commenting on this post or by sending me an email or text.

I am thrilled to have completed this novel and am eager to share it with all of you!

This morning’s prompt for our weekly writers group was this: “You receive a beautifully wrapped gift. What is inside?” This is what I wrote …

The Gift

The gift was left outside our porch door on the morning of April 21, 2025, my birthday. When I opened the door to let Eilidh outside, there it was, an unexpected and happy surprise. The package was cubed in shape, seven inches to a side, and the wrapping simple and elegant, redolent of the much-awaited spring, a opalescent-white paper printed with sprigs of lavender. The rendering of the interwoven silvery-green stems and delicate purple flowers was exquisite, so much so that I could almost smell the intoxicating woody scent of the lavender blossoms.

In fact, I did smell that wonderful fragrance. The package was encircled by strips of a pale green ribbon, tied at the top into a simple six-looped bow. Bound into the knot at the center of the bow were three freshly-cut lavender sprigs, extending to the edges of the package, each mounted between two of the loops of ribbon, their number marking not the directions of the compass, which are four, nor the elements — air, earth, fire, and water — because they are four in number, too. Instead, the three bring to mind the primary passions of the human spirit — faith and hope and love.

There was no tag on the gift, nothing to indicate from whom it came or for whom it was intended, but since it was my birthday, I assumed the gift was meant for me. I stooped to lift the package from the grey-painted porch deck and held it in both hands as Eilidh ran around the yard, stopping here and there, now and then, to sniff the awakening earth and to do her jobs. The gift was light, of little heft, its feel giving scant clue as to what lay inside.

I did not hazard any guess. I did not want to hazard any guess, because what lay inside that package — if anything at all — did not matter to me. It was the promise of its giving, the generous act of its being shared, the enchanting elegance of its presentation that mattered to me. When Eilidh was finished and ready to go back inside, I carried the gift in my hands to my bedroom at the back of the house and placed it on a shelf of the tall darkly-stained pine cabinet next to my side of the bed where it sits even now, ever a gracious reminder that I am loved.

Gathering in the tender hours of a crystalline winter morning in Maine, eleven members of the Deer Isle Writers Group enjoyed the blessed bounty of a Bayley buffet before pausing, after some persistent chatter about Thanksgiving dinners and two-year-old puppies and three-thousand-acre broccoli fields in northern Maine, to listen with careful consideration to a prompt delivered by erudite writer cum gifted artist, Frederica Marshall, the prompt curiously provocative, a line from an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem, “childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies,” prompting, as it were, from some of them immediate protestations to the contrary, those writers maintaining that, of course, goldfish die and pets die and, yes, people die, too, when one is yet a child, except that, if you read Millay’s poem, you realize that is not her point at all, that she readily acknowledges that cats die then to be buried by a weeping child in the backyard in a box bigger than a shoe-box, engendering a grief that, though entirely real, does not burrow deep into one’s soul eliciting an outburst of “Oh, God! Oh, God!” in the middle of the night two years hence, and that distant relatives die that the child hardly knows and, therefore, “cannot really be said to have lived at all,” all of this a prelude to the crux of her poem which is that “childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters,” meaning mothers and fathers, meaning mothers and fathers don’t die, except they do sometimes and do eventually, which is her point, that the death of a mother or a father, of one toward whom all of one’s kingdom is oriented, knowing intimately their routines, their foibles, their quotidian pleasures, their well-earned pride, the death of this mother or this father leaving one standing alone in their house drinking tea now gone cold, is the death of childhood.

The forecast is partly cloudy. Must be the weather-maker can’t make up her mind. Or perhaps it is we who are confused, unable to understand a thing as it is, but only as what it is not, not wholly sunny, not wholly cloudy.

But why must a bluebird day be cloudless? Why can’t a cerulean sky decorated here and there and there with cotton ball clouds be considered perfect in itself, whole in itself, not part this or part that?

August 17 was such a day, a playful breeze rustling skirts and tussling hair as we gathered on the roof of the Harmac in downtown Cedar Rapids, a perfect day, a perfect day for a wedding, bright sun warming our foreheads and sparkling on shirts and dresses and ties, blue and red, yellow and purple, a kaleidoscope of bright colors worn per the bride’s request, all of us sharing her joy, all of us sharing their joy, as huge puffy clouds drifted overhead.

As he said, “I give myself to you to be your husband,” and as she said, “I give myself to you to be your wife,” the day, wind and sun and cloud, gave itself to us, not in part, but in whole, imprinting that time-stilling moment indelibly, not only on our minds and on our hearts, but on our skin, too.

There is little in this world that is all this or all that, but much in this world that is beautiful, beautiful as it is, at any given moment and in any given place an amalgam of this and that, of feeling and color, of sense and mystery, of change and stillness, of sun and cloud.

“Now, to what can I compare the people of this day?,” Jesus said. “They are like children sitting in the marketplace. One group shouts to the other, ‘We played wedding music for you, but you wouldn’t dance! We sang funeral songs, but you wouldn’t cry!’” But you, perhaps neither dancing nor crying, are as you are, and that is whole, that is good, that is perfect, and that is what we must see and love.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

I was born in the cruellest month, this month of dead land, in Maine a time of in-between, of not still and not yet, not still winter but not yet spring, mud season, colorless season unless you count the dull brown of lawn and roadside or the dull grey of bare trunks and branches. I might wish to have been born in July, like my wife, revelling in the brilliant light dancing among the yellows and purples and reds of the lilies, or in October, like my grandson, tramping up a rock-strewn trail among oak and birch and maple exulting in their autumnal dress.

But I was born in the cruellest month, this month mixing memory and desire, each birthday cataloging an ever increasing number of days and months and years irretrievable immutable shaping me but also binding me a looming thatness out of which or against which I now must make myself wanting yearning praying to be free to be able to live in and for and by what is beautiful.

I was born in the cruellest month, this month stirring dull roots with spring rain, asking old limbs to dance and a jaded spirit to soar, teasingly intimating that adventure and revelation and joy are just over the horizon …

Or perhaps they are …

Perhaps April is not the cruellest month, but a month for hope undimmed and unvanquished, undeterred by bleak days and starless nights, unfazed by any accumulation of burdensome remembrance, unfettered by any limitations laid on spirit or body by time or space.

April is the bravest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, infusing
Memory with desire, stirring
Dull roots to new life with spring rain.