Dear Lord, September was quite an event-filled month as I flew from France to the US to begin our six-month stay in the States. I will write about all my signings soon, but for now I’m back home in Flintstone, Georgia, and I let out a long sigh of relief and thanksgiving. Across the sunroom from me is a little nook that I call ‘Dr. Seuss meets Flintstone’. Do you remember the Truffula Trees from The Lorax?

Well, as my family is little by little cleaning out our my parents’ home on Nancy Creek Road (featured in By Way of the Moonlight and you can take a tour of the property here), I spent hours pruning and pampering the plants left in my parents’ lovely bathroom suite that had, ah-hem, been neglected for quite a while.

I was determined to bring them back to the sunroom we added onto our home in Flintstone last year. The sweet palmish-looking tree had suffered badly, and I had to cut off several dead branches. But I succeeded in saving it and somehow fitting it into my mom’s Tahoe, the Truffula Tree’s terra cotta pot laying on its side in the back end of the car with the tree’s top fronds tickling me as I drove two hours from Atlanta to Flintstone.

First, I stopped in LaFayette, Georgia to hug Andrew and Lacy and their tribe. And Paul, for we’d been apart for the last week.

And now the Truffula Tree is making me so happy as I gaze across the sunroom and smile.

This is my life right now, Lord. Soon I’ll journal about the writers’ conference in St. Louis and the launch party for ‘Moonlight’ in Atlanta, and the other signings in Atlanta and Michigan, and so much more.

But today, all I want to do is gaze across the sunroom at my Truffula Tree and let all the bittersweetness of these past months well up. I have tears and a smile, because life is paradox. And the memories of this little tree in my parents’ bathroom suite are many, some so hard, Lord. But the hard is resurrected into the delightful, as You so often do. And I hold it tight to my chest and say, “Merci”.

And to you, my dear readers, I’m once again participating in this giveaway for inspirational fiction. Click here to enter (where you’ll receive all the instructions for multiple chances to win the books in the graphic below.)

Do you have a Truffula Tree in your life that makes you smile?

ELIZABETH MUSSER writes ‘entertainment with a soul’ from her writing chalet—tool shed—outside Lyon, France (and sometimes at her childhood desk in Flintstone, Georgia). Find more about Elizabeth’s novels at www.elizabethmusser.com and on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and her blog, Letters to the Lord.