Chapter Six: Violets and Bulls in the Graveyard

by laura | Nov 9, 2011 | Amazing Grace

After my long illness, deep changes in my metabolism emerged and the beginning of life-long health issues started to manifest in full force.  For the next three decades, I seldom felt completely well again.  This is typical for people with auto-immune disorders, as I...

Chapter Seven: Trapezes and Dog Days

by laura | Nov 9, 2011 | Amazing Grace

Needless to say, I was ecstatic to go home at the end of the term.  And I was confident my grandfather would keep his promise to see that we didn’t have to return.  But I wasn’t prepared for all the changes in the year we were away.  A year is a long time...

Chapter Eight: The Farm

by laura | Nov 9, 2011 | Amazing Grace

Everyone in the family called it The Farm with capital letters.  An old Florida Cracker style farmhouse already a century old when my grandparents bought it in the Great Depression of the 1930s, it came with eleven acres, a tidal spring or “bayhead,” and...

Chapter Nine: The Stand Off

by laura | Nov 9, 2011 | Amazing Grace

The Farm gave me the best environment to ponder the nature of Evil and how it came to exist.  Yes, I had been taught that Man sinned in Eden because Eve was tempted and passed the temptation along to Adam.  But this simple story did not answer the question of so great...

Chapter Ten: Shrinks and Rebels or Being Fifteen is an Awkward State

by laura | Nov 9, 2011 | Amazing Grace

Rumors about aliens and flying saucers flooded the school the year I went into eighth grade.  First there was a story about a man who lived up on Highway 50 near Weeki Wachee. John Reeves claimed he’d been taken up in a space ship by aliens landing in the woods...

Chapter Eleven: Graveyards, Psychopaths, Psychics, and Meetings on the Bridge

by laura | Nov 10, 2011 | Amazing Grace

My mother, always mindful of beauty and appearances, decided to do something about my weight. She believed that how I looked reflected on her, and she disliked being accompanied everywhere by a chubby child.  So she told the pediatrician to prescribe a diet for me. ...