“Everbloom: Stories of Deeply Rooted and Transformed Lives”

Forty-one members of the Redbud Writers Guild have come together to provide stories of hope and redemption, often from very deep and very dark holes. Editors Shayne Moore and Margaret Ann Philbrick have assembled these 41 stories into Everbloom:Stories of Deeply Rooted and Transformed Lives.

Organized into four sections – “Roots,” “Trunk,” “Branches,” and “Blossoms,” Everbloom is filled with a broad diversity of stories and poems – nothing seems similar or repetitive. These accounts do have one thing in common – they are riveting accounts of scenes, issues, events, tragedies, and triumphs in the lives of Christian women.

A missionary kid watches a local man beat his wife, and sees her father unable to do anything about it.

An old tree is cut down.

A career move takes away everything and everyone who is familiar.

From childhood, a woman lives with fear of abduction.

A much-wanted baby is lost in miscarriage.

A young woman is gang-raped.

A brother kills himself.

A short-term missionary trip becomes an introduction to AIDS in Africa.

A woman who can’t stop bleeding.

A pastor who becomes an activist for ageism – when her professor husband is told by his Christian college that they have to let him go for budget reasons, and, oh, by the way, could he train his younger replacement?

And more. A lot more.

These stories are the stuff of real experience and real life. But they’re more than stories – they’re lessons we can all apply.

Each story and poem has a prayer and a writing prompt, so the book becomes more than a collection. It’s an invitation to consider your own life and your own experiences.

I’m not familiar with all of the writers and poets included in the book, but I do follow the writing of several, including April Yamasaki, Leslie Leyland Fields, and Sarah Rennicke. That’s the other benefit of the book – to find new people to read and follow.

Everbloom is moving, and often heart wrenching, but it always about hope.

Top photograph by Rostislav Kralik via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Photo: Mother, 2 Sons

The photographer
arranged us just so,
seated on the coffee
table with a soft white
screen as backdrop.
We’re smiling, or course,
that’s what you do
in pictures, you smile.
And we each wear white.
You’re in the middle,
all of 34 years old
with the towhead son
on your right and the
redhead son on your left.
I look at the photo now
and think she’s beautiful,
with those cheekbones
and narrow face and
those smiling eyes still
full of dreams and life
and laughter. And now
when we talk a half
century later you
still end the conversation
every time with
I love you.

My mother still has this photo, placed in a big leather-bound family photo album, or else I’d include it here. Five years later, the third son came along.

This poem is submitted for One Shot Sunday, hosted by One Stop Poetry. Instead of a photo prompt, this edition of One Shot Sunday has Mother’s Day as the prompt. To see more poems, please visit the site.

My Mom and Me: The Early Years

My mother was born in 1923, and born at home on Dauphine Street in New Orleans. She was the fourth of six children, five girls and one boy. The house was located in the Ninth Ward of the city, an area of numerous vegetable gardens for the markets at the back of the French Quarter.

She was a beautiful child, and strongly favored by her father, who’d take her visiting to friends and to his various local haunts. The family had been fairly well off – her two oldest sisters had memories of wearing silk dresses – but then hit hard times. My mother did not know silk dresses. But she loved her family and had a special bond with both of her parents.

Her father died when she was 12. The Great Depression was still going strong, and her mother went to work as a cleaning lady in movie theaters. My mother can remember times when there was nothing in the house to eat, and what it meant to go to bed hungry.

She attended John McDonough High School, then an all-girls public school. And she did well, and loved Spanish (she was president of the Spanish Club) so much that she had her heart set on becoming a Spanish teacher. But life intervened. First came a romance with a football player for Holy Cross High School; the area where my mother grew up is still known today as the “Holy Cross District.” Then came World War II, and a quick wartime marriage that produced one son but didn’t survive the war.

She had worked through the war at the Port of Embarkation in New Orleans, which helped process military recruits for sending overseas. After the war, she continued to work, mostly as a secretary. She eventually landed as a secretary of a trade publisher for the shipping industry, where she worked for – my father. They were married in 1950.

My earliest memories of her date from about 1953 or 1954. And they’re associated with living in a duplex in suburban Jefferson Parish. I wasn’t exactly Dennis the Menace, but I was active and creative.

I thought the new sofa needed some color, so I added black shoe polish, a kind of early performance art.

I snuck the dog in the house, which was strictly verboten, and then had to hide him when I heard my mother come in. I was in the kitchen, so I found the most accessible place to hide him. The oven. (No, it wasn’t on.)

She wouldn’t let me play with her pots, so when she went to check on the clothes in the washing machine in the garage, I locked the screen door and proceeded to play with the pots. She had to get the neighbor next door to take the door off the hinges to get inside.

When she needed a break from her child, she’d vacuum. All it took was the first sound of the vacuum cleaner being turned on and I was on the sofa (the one with the shoe polish stains). She likes to vacuum to this day.

We moved to a new neighborhood when I was 4, and I vividly remember moving day, with my mother stationed in the new house while I rode with my father back to the old house to finish cleaning out the kitchen. I was worried, because our new house was next to woods. I remember asking my father if my mother would be okay with the bears.

Shortly after we moved in, she took driving lessons, so she could drive me to kindergarten at Mount Olive Lutheran School. She hated to drive, but the idea of all the bus transfer that she would have to make – and four times a day if she wanted to go back home – was too much. So she learned to drive, and sat in the driver’s seat exactly the same way for the next 45 years – upright posture, very proper, very serious and very attentive. But even after she learned to drive, she always preferred the bus or the “streetcar” – the New Olreans version of a trolley. Many times I remember riding with her on the bus into the city to see a movie at one of the four big downtown theaters – the Saenger, the Lowe’s State, the Joy and the RKO Orpheum. (The buildings are all still there but only the Saenger remains as a theater.)

My mother loved movies. She saw Gone with the Wind and the Wizard of Oz when they were first released. She loved all of the movies, but especially the epics and the romances. One day, she took me with her to see a movie called The Last Voyage with Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone, which was so full of tension that I cried through most of it. It was not a suitable movie for an 8-year-old.

Some mothers might have taken their distraught child to get ice cream cone or (in New Orleans) french doughnuts (beignets) at Café du Monde. Not my mother. She took her distraught child right across the street to the Joy Theater to see Some Like it Hot with Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe.

Of course, she got to see another movie on the same day. She would consider that a good day.


To see more posts on mothers, motherhood and Mother’s Day, please visit the blog carnival hosted by Bonnie Gray at Faith Barista.

Top Photograph: My mother with my grandson Cameron, June 9, 2010, New Orleans.

Bottom illustration: Canal Street, New Orleans, about 1930. Except for the cars, it looked much the same when my mother took me to the movies. The Saenger Theater is on the left and the Loew's State theater is on the right.

A Mother's Song

She turns her head,
the slight curve of her neck
shimmering a slight movement
of her shoulders, just enough
to remind me of
my fingers tracing her back
as we dance
the embrace of oneness,
her arm clasped lightly
on mine, touching,
the low murmur of our voices
its own sweet music.

This poem is submitted for One Shot Wednesday, hosted by One Stop Poetry. To see other poems, please visit the site. The links will be live at 4 p.m. Central time today.

This poem is also submitted for The High Calling’s Random Act of Poetry, which is seeking poems about mothers, grandmothers, motherhood, or son- or daughter-hood, for Mother’s Day (deadline is April 29).