Marilyn Schroeder

Kathryn, Emma, and Marian are good friends. Two live in a fine retirement community and appreciate its benefits. They are exploring issues of aging, living well, and dying well.

Seventy-five poems written in free verse. Awakening is a first effort by a writer inspired by poet Mary Oliver.

Olive and Laura, main characters, help their community of older adults and enrich their own lives.

Grace is a beautiful, troubled woman, a mystery viewable only by the reflections of others. Central to the novel is the revelation of her story by others - her alcoholic husband David, her friends, her sister, her lover, and her colleagues at the hospital where she is a physician's assistant. Their reflections disclose how she has drifted from both her first love and her calling as a researcher. As her marriage unravels, Grace's life fragments. She's attacked and injured by a drug-addled patient, her father appears to be failing mentally, and her daughter is injured. When she learns that Colter, the man she ran from as an eighteen year old, has become critically ill with cancer, her path clarifies. She leaves her husband and returns to her home town to reconnect with her true loves - Colter and science. Her strength of character is needed as David becomes violent over the divorce and separation from his children. She fights to keep Colter alive and learns from him how to live mindfully.

Two Susans share a last summer. Susan Carson faces a mind-numbing factory job at the end of summer unless she can prove herself as a professional author. Becoming a companion to the dying artist, Susan Stone, means a chance to have time to write, time she does not have on a hard-working farm in Depression times. The older woman is indomitable, passionate and difficult, but warms to the younger. She shares the stories of her childhood, her dashing father, her marriage, and her life in the art circles of Paris and New York. She completes her last paintings. Young Susan learns of life both vicariously and at firsthand as she listens, writes, faces rejection, falls in love, and acknowledges that she must decide whether her heart or her talent will guide her life.