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      A Flock

      of Sparrows

      A Novel

      Helen Foster Reed

      A FLOCK OF SPARROWS

      Copyright © 2016

      Helen R. Myers, M. June Foster, and M. Gail Reed

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted or otherwise transferred either electronically, mechanically, or via audio, or by any other means known or hereafter invented, without the written permission of the authors.

      This is a work of fiction, and all characters within are the imagination of the authors. All names and places are fictitious, or if geographically or historically real are used fictionally.

      Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com

       http://www.eBookIt.com

      ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2786-7

      For more information, visit www.helenfosterreed.com

      Cover Art: Stephen Marshall

      In loving memory of our husbands,

      Robert Clinton Myers

      Albert Wayne Foster

      Dennis Michael Reed D.V.M.

      Acknowledgments

      We have been blessed by a state of grace. This book is a journey that represents over one hundred years of marriage, and (none of your business) years of living. It has brought us to innumerable moments of insight and wisdom, and has rewarded us with countless friendships, along with being trusted with experiences of people who have walked the difficult road that we have walked. We respect—and within these pages—pay honor to you all.

      In the most personal sense . . .

      HELEN R. MYERS: After over fifty books, I’ve tried to keep up with my gratitude to those who have enriched my life and made my professional world so much easier to navigate. Since this unasked for fork in the road, I’d especially like to salute intrepid Leslie King for her diligent and resourceful handling of my online presence through the years. I treasure you and your friendship. And for being there 24/7 to dog sit, lend an ear, help me move, etc., since life turned upside down, special love to Dolores and “Dead Eye” James Dugger.

      MADELEINE JUNE FOSTER: For four years, I have travelled a different and new road in life, navigating a journey I couldn’t have managed without the support of my dear family and many friends. I can never name all of the ways you have helped me, but I pray that you grasp my sincere thanks and love. To my children and grandchildren—Kim and Bruce Gatlin, Jeff and Kristi Foster, Tucker, Caleb, Tyler, Madilynn, and Zachary—thank you all for the love and for holding my hand along this path that we’ve taken together.

      MARY GAIL REED: I would like to thank my children: Robin and Steven Simmons, Laura and Clint Calvert, Keely and Bryan Sheets, and Michael and Meredith Reed. And I cannot forgo citing my sweet grandchildren: Blakeley and Brooks Briscoe, Sarah Grace Simmons, Evagail, Morris, and Reed Calvert, Thomas, Brylan, and Keegan Sheets, and Emmersyn and Easton Reed. You have not only been my ballast, you have been beyond encouraging. Know that you fill my heart with joy and laughter. I love you all so much.

      “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life,

      what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what

      you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body,

      more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not

      sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father

      feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?”

      —Matthew 6:25-26

      One

      ONE INVALUABLE LESSON I’ve learned in the last seven years is that things don’t always fall perfectly into place, no matter how hard you work or will it. Life has its ebbs and flows just like the powerful ocean’s tide, and come a riptide, the flow has a way of sweeping us off balance. It certainly did me. After thirty-six years of marriage, at the very moment I thought my feet had become buried deep enough into the sandy depths of stability to weather almost anything, my husband Charlie died.

      I still remember the instant I found his lifeless body. I collapsed from the shock and abruptness of it, as if our land had incomprehensively turned into an ocean, and I had been sucked deep under water like bait grabbed by a single-minded predator starved to feed. I imagined that’s what drowning must feel like, that inability to breathe, the sensation that my lungs were filling with water. Instincts and panic quickly took over; and, after using my cell phone to call 9-1-1, I went to work trying to save him. My eyes, my fifty-four-year-old mind that had absorbed years of experience, knew he was gone; yet my heart, suddenly flooded with almost teenage-like, unconditional love, wouldn’t accept reality. That’s the memory that continues to haunt me. I still miss him so. I’m missing him even more now at sixty-one, as the storm of the century is surging into Texas, bringing God only knew what trouble and danger with it.

      It is strange, though, that I’m thinking as if I were a New Englander, a person of the sea. In my youth, I was a romantic and dreamer, an arm-chair adventurer thanks to voracious reading. I also fell in love with the dramatic art of the Wyeths, especially N.C.’s action-driven book illustrations, to the point that sometimes I yearn for the ocean. I guess my mother was right; she’d told me more than once when you’re born under an astrological water sign—in our case, Cancer—you instinctively react and relate with metaphors about water, even if you’re a native of land-locked Northeast Texas.

      Full disclosure: We are barely five-hundred feet above sea level here, and the region is richly saturated with rivers, creeks, springs, ponds, and lakes, making this a perfect place to at least benefit from some of nature’s subtler liquid vibrations. Interestingly, Mother and I came into this world with earth moons in our birth charts, therefore, we’re also prone to love home and stability—and we married men born into the farming and ranching life, as we had been, which cinched the deal. We were and are East Texans for life.

      Oddly enough, as much as I’m intrigued by such trivia, I almost never read my horoscope. However, like all of the old timers who have farmed land or raised livestock, I pay attention to lunar and planetary cycles, and know when it’s a good time to plant, to dehorn animals, mate stock for the easiest birthing, and the rest. On this late November morning, the TV meteorologist’s report served as confirmation a storm is coming and it is going to be bad. My favorite online website confirmed several of the planets are in water and air signs, indicating the atmosphere contained way too much liquid energy, and it was going to be propelled by a stronger wind than usual.

      So far the breeze was from the west, light and mild, although I could tell that a shift was at hand. Soon there would be dramatic changes. Before noon a howling wind from the north would send temperatures plummeting over thirty degrees. Wind-driven snow, and perhaps ice, would be blasting through the trees, especially our more fragile pines, with the force of a hurricane making landfall. No one would go unscathed. As a widow still fending for herself on this big property, I had work to do.

      When the phone rang, I had a gut hunch as to who the caller was even before the first jingle ended. Maggie Lamar and I had been friends for nearly six decades and seldom a morning went by that we didn’t talk. Our agenda would be single-minded today.

      Without wasting time on any greeting, she began, “Retta, have you seen the latest weather report on TV?”

      “You know there’s nothing else on our local channels. Do you have your bag packed?” I asked. “Considering how the power goes out on your side of town during the mildest thunderstorm, you’ll be better off here.”

      My

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