Happy Birthday, Rachel Griffin!
A report on the state of The Sixth Book of Unexpected Enlightenment
Valerie Hunt and her Roanoke Glass articles on the Roanoke Dorms will return soon, but this email is from me.
First, before we get started, we are experimenting with moving from Mailchimp to Substack. Let me know if you have any trouble with this email or if it differs from previous emails in some annoying way.
Okay… Today, March 30th, 2023 is Rachel Griffin’s 13th birthday. The Books of Unexpected Enlightenment start in 2023 (which was 12 years in the future when I began them), so Rachel will be starting at Roanoke Academy this September (so to speak. :-)
By sheer chance (or divine providence), in the spring of 2024, Easter happens to fall on March 31st—the day between Rachel’s birthday of March 30 and Siggy’s birthday of April 1st. Rachel does not know about Easter, but she does have an unexpected adventure that day that, perhaps, could only have begun on such a day.
Two years ago, on this day, Book Five was released. Last year, as Easter approached, I was nearing the end of Book Six and thought it would be out soon.
The night before Easter, I attended a midnight mass at my husband’s church. The church was filled with long trumpet-shaped Easter lilies. They were so beautiful. Now, it so happened that the scene I was working on for Book Six that day took place the night before Easter. As I sat there in the church, I found myself suddenly inspired with an idea for the next scene.
I rushed home and wrote a passage that was the beginning of an adventure that I will not explain because SPOILERS! I stayed up into the wee hours working on this description. The whole time, I kept pausing to think of how much my mother would love this particular description and how I could not wait to read it to her the next morning.
But when I reached her house Easter morning, it was to discover that my mother had left us for brighter pastures.
My mother was 16 days short of turning 89. She was spy and active and jogged and took ballet classes. Her departure took everyone by surprise.
I guess Jesus rose up on Easter morning…and He took her with Him.
A great deal of the last year has been spent handling my mom’s estate. Book Six is done, but it is still being edited and polished. God willing, I will get it to you soon.
In the meantime, here is the passage I wrote last Easter night/morning and was never able to read to my mom. (Kudos to anyone who remembers what it means when Rachel can perceive music that she cannot hear with her ear. ;-)
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From The Sixth Book of Unexpected Enlightenment: Guardians of the Twilight Lands:
That night, at the stroke of midnight, Rachel found herself whistling along with a waltz she could not hear with her ears. She sat up and listened warily, whistling bits of the Skater’s Waltz. Then, she hopped out of bed, grabbed Vroomie, and flew out the French doors, soaring over her balcony and upward. She rose over the lip of the eaves and found herself staring in awe.
The roof had been transformed. Roses the color of the face of the moon bloomed on the ordinarily ivy-covered walls of the Old Castle, filling the air with the most astonishing perfume. The flat flagstones of the roof above her room, between the rounded stone wall of the Old Castle and the reflecting pool to the north, were encircled by dozens and dozens of pots of a flower she did not recognize. It was a lily, but the blossoms were at least seven inches long and shaped like a trumpet, with six points at the mouth that curled away from the opening. The lily itself was also moon-white, but inside each one glowed a stamen the color of candle flame. This pale golden light shone through the trumpet-like flower so that while the roses were the color of the moon, the lilies seemed to glow with the soft creamy gold of candlelight.
Seven will-o-wisps as large as her hand hung in the air high above these flowers, forming a circle that spun slowly widdershins. Unlike domestic wisps, they had faces, bright and pixie-like, that appeared and disappeared in the curls of their golden flame. Below, twelve smaller wisps, these the color of moonlight and about the size of the pad of her thumb, formed a larger circle and spun in the opposite direction in time to the music.
Rachel paused, charmed by the eerie dancing wisps. She could now hear the Skater’s Waltz with her ears. The mingled scents of roses and lilies were so glorious that she would not have minded if she had never breathed anything else.
