Introduction

Twenty years ago, Anna Hott thought she could control everything -- her crumbling marriage, her demanding children, her hectic life -- by quitting her high-placed job in New York City and moving her family to tranquil Sanibel Island, Florida. But she brought her untamed emotions, her rage toward her cheating husband, and her yearning to write a novel with her. When her husband and children left the house for a week, Anna thought at last she would get her household, her novel, and her mind in order. Instead, her elderly neighbor Fedelina Aurelio knocked on her door bearing flowers and homespun wisdom, and when Fedelina's recently divorced son arrived, Anna had a test of passions and a test of truth. Now, at 56 with an empty nest, Anna Holt pulls out the incomplete manuscript she started that memorable week and -- to find closure for her life and a conclusion for her novel -- travels to Indiana to visit Fedelina who lives in a nursing home. A novel framed within a novel, Sand In My Eyes is both a story about the tension between motherhood and personal dreams as well as a story about women across generations inspiring one another to let beauty persist despite ugly circumstances.

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Excerpt

Dear Marjorie, After we talked, I hung up the phone and stayed awake, thinking of you, of all that is stressing you at college. I’m writing to tell you how proud I am of you, studying the way you are, and the grades you are

getting. You are an ambitious woman and will achieve great things in

the world. But more importantly, I hope you live a life that you love.

There is nothing a mother longs to hear more than that her grown

daughter is living a life she loves.

This is not to say life is meant to be an everyday beautiful walk in the

park. It’s not. But as you journey into adulthood, you will hear all kinds

of advice and things said about life, and will experience them for yourself.

In case you’re wondering, here are a few of the things your mother

has heard, a few of the things she has experienced for herself:

Life is brilliant, life is dull. It’s easy, it’s hard. It’s about reaping wealth,

about giving to others, about living passionately, about doing what one

must to survive. Life is joy. Life is suffering. The bigger the better, less world, an ugly world, a world moving toward peace, a world headed for destruction. People are good. People are bad. Ask for help. Do it yourself.

I hope you rake through that which you hear about life. Some of the stuff, keep, but some, bag up and burn. As you work your way through this world you will see that everyone has something to say and is an authority on “life.” Me? I can relate to most everything I’ve heard. It depends on the morning I’m having.

I stopped writing, then folded and dropped the letter to my daughter into my purse. My writing it was the act of a loony mother bird, one whose baby has left the yard for the first time. It had me awake at five, pacing the floor of the hotel room, unable to sleep, worrying whether I had taught her everything she needed to know about survival and the world—how to find food, water and shelter, and to fly, of course, but more importantly, how to soar; had I taught my daughter how to soar through life, so her journey is not all demanding, but breathtakingly beautiful, too?

“I don’t think I taught her that,” I mumbled to myself as I picked out a bouquet of flowers from a kiosk in the hotel lobby. “But if I pick her up and bring her back to me, she’ll only want to leave again. That’s where she’s at in life. She’s flown the nest.”

As I unlocked the car I had rented for the week and got in, I had to start accepting it, that it was my time now, and to focus on the very present

and the trip I was on—the trip that was mine—the trip to southern Indiana!

They say convertibles are the best cars for women suffering hot flashes, but after opening the hood, trunk, and gas door I found myself sweating profusely by the time I found the button that makes the top go down. It made me want to pull out the letter I had started to my daughter and add a P.S. to it to tell her that life is frustrating, that, well into my fifties, I had wanted by now to have mastered the basics and to be going about philoLemmonsophically, spending my mornings sipping green tea in profound thought; not wasting precious time struggling to get the top down on a convertible!

But, oh well, it was a five-mile drive from my hotel to the nursing home and Indiana’s crisp autumn air had me forgetting my frustrations and thinking instead how wonderful life can be—until I picked up speed and my hair whipped across my eyes, making it hard to see the colorful corn stalks out in the fields.

“This is not the best car for me,” I muttered under my breath, questioning

the guy who worked at the rental car agency, and all the other so-called experts of the world. “Who are they and what are their credentials?”

And because I didn’t want to miss the corn drying, and the crimson maple trees, and the big white birds headed south for winter after a summer

spent in the Midwest, I pulled to the side of the road to buy a cup of apple cider and slices of fudge, and to tie my hair back with the silk scarf I kept in my purse, the one I typically wore around my neck to hide the telltale signs of my age. I then took my sunglasses off and put my reading glasses on, instead. I had taped the directions to the nursing home to the dashboard and would soon need to look at them.

I was on my way and feeling older than I did the last time I rode in a convertible—twenty years ago, through a wildlife refuge in Florida; a forbidden

ride I have never told anyone about, my romantic secret that only the tri-colored herons witnessed, and I’m sure they haven’t told. And there were a few other birds looking down at us that day, but I can’t remember what they’re called, the ones that seem to be wearing golden slippers. Their name was on the tip of my tongue, lingering with all the other words I had been forgetting lately.

As I continued along the winding country road, I worried that if I were forgetting things at my age, what if the friend I had flown all this way to see wouldn’t remember me? I was the frazzled mother of three who lived next door from long ago. She was the elderly widow who, by way of her garden, lent me a unique way of looking at my life and the world. After all these years, I’ve never forgotten her, and I hope she hasn’t me.

Serendipity is what helped me in tracking her whereabouts when, recently,

I turned on the radio and listened to a national story on butterfly gardens cropping up throughout the country, at campuses, schools, museums,

zoos, and institutions. I was captivated by the interview they did with a resident of a nursing home, by what she had to say and, to my astonishment,

I knew before they gave a name that it was her, my neighbor from long ago.

“It’s the life cycle of the butterflies that gets me to thinking,” she told them when asked whether the newly instated garden had increased her quality of life at the facility. “I’m old and frail,” she went on, “but like those butterflies need flowers, I need people. I crave the company of others.”

I glanced at the directions taped to the dashboard, the ones her son— Liam is his name—had given to me. After hearing his mother on the radio, I tracked him down and called. I had met him back when I was living

next door to her, and it was he who took me on that ride in his mother’s

convertible, the ride that gave the birds something to chirp about.

“Remember that silly little story about flowers?” I told him over the phone the day I called, the day I booked my flight. “The one I started way back when I lived next door to your mother?”

“The one you wouldn’t let me read?”

“That’s the one,” I said. “Well, I’ve been tinkering with it on and off

for years now.”

“And you’re done?”

“Not quite,” I said. “That’s why I’m calling. I need to see your mother. I need her blessing before I move forward with the story, before I send it out into the world. After all, she’s the inspiration behind it, and so are you to an extent.”

“Is this story of yours fiction or fact?”

“A little of both,” I told him.

“Should I be worried?”

“It was a long time ago. You shouldn’t be. I’ve changed the names and made up a bunch of stuff. It’s hard to remember everything the way it happened.”

“How many years has it been, twenty?”

“Around that,” I told him. “I’m better of not doing the calculations.”

“Well, my mother is in a nursing home in Indiana—sharp as a whip mentally, but physically, she’s touch and go. I don’t know how much longer

she can go on.”

I glanced over at the simple three-step directions he had given me to where his mother was living and felt remorse over the friendship I had let wither away—silently retreating over differing points of view one day—and for having lost touch, and for showing up now, after all these years of not making a simple phone call or sending a single letter. I had been feeling

this way lately about several past friendships I had let fall by the wayside.

It happens at a certain age. We question ourselves regarding things we once did and said, and more so over the things we didn’t do or say. It’s why I flew all this way to reunite with her and tell her, “I’m sorry, please forgive me,” for the ending we had.

Only then would I be able to write an appropriate ending to my novel and move on, by asking if she had any of the tidbits she used to share with me—ideas for how a woman my age might go about re-landscaping her current life and the dullness setting in.

“This is the day,” I declared out loud as I turned into the parking lot of Belvedere Nursing Home. “This is the day for change in my life.” view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the publisher:

1. LIVING A LIFE ONE LOVES. According to the prologue, there is nothing a mother longs to hear more than her grown daughter living a life she loves. Do mothers hear this today or do they often hear something different from their daughters? The older Anna was worried whether she had taught her daughter “how to soar through life, so her journey is not all demanding, but breathtakingly beautiful, too.” Is this something mothers can teach their daughters? If so, in what ways?

2. PHASES OF LIFE. What stages of life does Anna go through? Do all mothers go through different sorrowful stages of transition? What helps them through these potential turning points?

3. CHALLENGES OF MOTHERHOOD. In the first chapters of the book, does Lemmon exaggerate how hard motherhood can be, or have you at times felt the way she describes? Fedelina says she has no secret to make motherhood easier. Have you heard of anything to make it easier? Do you know of any secrets?

4. THE FIERY FOREST. Anna makes frequent references to a fiery forest in her mind. What might this fiery forest represent? Have you found anything to help you from worrying at night? What suggestions do you
have for people who lie awake at night fearing and thinking negative thoughts?

5. ONE WEEK TO YOURSELF. Young Anna gets a whole week to herself. Suppose you’re in the “stage of life” that Anna is in—bombarded by housework and small children. Then you’re granted one week all to yourself in your home. How would you want to spend it? Realistically, how would you spend it? How did Anna’s husband want her spending the week? How did she really spend it? Is the want for such time alone realistic? Why do women feel guilty once they get it?

6. DREAMS ON THE BACK BURNER. Anna thinks of “all the things a mother does in a day—things she doesn’t want to do but must—and walked over to my writing desk instead. It wasn’t that I did writing at the desk—I didn’t have time—but it was a writing desk nonetheless and when I cleared the clutter, a desire to create flooded my mind, and as I dusted the deep mahogany with my finger, I felt an urge from within compelling me to start.” What is something you wish you could fit into your life everyday? Why are you not doing it now? At what age do you feel you will finally start it?

7. SHARING PROBLEMS. The first time her neighbor knocks at her door, Anna quickly changes the mask she is wearing on her face from miserable woman whose life is in disarray to ‘my life is astounding.’ Anna
doesn’t want to “be one of those women who verbally dump her overwhelmed side on others and, besides, it’s simpler to pretend that all is fine.” Talking about problems is a healthy thing to do; however, is there a difference between talking to friends about problems and becoming a draining person?

8. ROUTINES AND REGRETS. When Anna was a publicist, she had fallen into routines she had disliked. What radical steps did she take to try to change her routines? In what ways is radical change possible? To what
degrees? Was Anna’s change extreme? Is it worth making extreme changes when we are unhappy with our lives, or is it risky or irresponsible? Do you agree with Liam when he says, “It’s your life! You can never take it too seriously. Most people don’t take it seriously enough. They go about never questioning discontentment. They live with it like the color of their eyes, something they can’t change. Me? I can’t do that, Anna, I expect more from life. Call me a revolutionary, but if there’s something I hate about my life, you better believe I’m going to set out to make radical changes.”?

9. UNHAPPINESS. What are Anna’s, Fedelina’s, and Liam’s views of happiness? Do you think any of them are truly happy at any point in the novel? Do you know people who are truly happy? Without naming, do
you know people who constantly crab?

10. TOO BEAUTIFUL A WORLD. Do you agree with Anna or with Fedelina that there is any such thing as a mother creating too beautiful a world for her children?

11. THE ENDING. What was your reaction to the ending? Of course you didn’t expect it, but were you upset with the ending or did you appreciate its intent?

Weblinks

»	Author Christine Lemmon's web site
»	Christine Lemmon's book club page
»	Christine Lemmon's blog

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