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A Note to the Reader

A Note to the Reader

What does home mean to you? Family? The place you live?

I began thinking about this in the last year or so after losing two members of my birth family within a few months of each other. It became more important to me to be physically closer to my grown children, so with the help of friends, I sold my home of twelve years in a small town and moved to a big city about an hour and a half farther north where I would be closer to my daughter and her little son.

While my little yellow house hadn’t been my dream home, it had become a nice, quiet sanctuary for me, and a place to own and also foster a number of dogs. I didn’t realize how wrenching it would be to leave it, even though we found a small house that was brighter and located just fifteen minutes from my daughter.

Jennifer, a woman who had started as someone helping me organize and take care of my home, became a good friend and she got me through alternating and unexpected bouts of crying as we packed. I veered between happiness when the house sold quickly—and anxiety about the process of leaving my safe little area and venturing into a big city. I am really a small town girl who doesn’t like big cities much.

But life is all about change and growth. I started thinking about what would happen if a young man who’s always only known his Amish community but struggled with a difficult father would do if he left that community . . . and then found he needed to return.

How would the woman he left behind feel about his return and his desire to rekindle their relationship?

I proposed the idea of an Amish series called Coming Home to my editor, Ramona Richards, and want to thank her for her enthusiasm for the project. Abingdon Press has been the home for my Amish books for a long time, and I appreciate everything Ramona and everyone at the company does to bring my work to readers.

I also want to thank my daughter, Stephany, and her son, Kasey, for finding me this home. They called me on her cell phone with the speaker on to tell me they had found this development which, I could hear him piping up, “has lots and lots of flowers . . .and bushes!” He sounded just like one of the hosts on the HGTV network shows he likes to watch with his mother.

Now I sit happily in a home office with a stencil on the wall behind me that says, “Home is where your story begins.”

Of course, my biggest thanks goes to God for giving me life and helping me to tell stories of hope and faith and love.