Richard W. shared a stream on April 20, 2023
Jan and her Orchid!

The Peace Lilly of Love!

No Green Thumb But Flowers Bloom With Jan's Love!

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 32 seconds
The Peace Lilly of Love!

The Peace Lilly of Love!

“You are overwatering the plants,” Jan declared.

Her comment baffled me, as I had only watered them once while she was in the hospital for the last two weeks.

I apologized and promised to do better.

“Why are you apologizing?”

“Because I did not take care of the plants.”

Turning on the faucet, I filled up the watering can.

“Do not worry about the plants; I need your help to get upstairs.”

I have always liked flowering plants and wanted to believe that Jan was not the only one with a green thumb.

Thanks to my friend Deb, I took a giant step toward making Apartment 3B my home last September!

With Deb’s guidance and commitment to care for the plants, an Orchid Jan received twenty-two months ago while in the hospital bloomed for the first time in February.

I was surprised that my Peace Lilly bloomed last week.

Jan and the Peace Lilly are the last things I see at night and the first things I see in the morning. It is on a bookcase by my bed next to a photo of the love of my life.

I have accepted I will never be a master gardener, but Jan is still with me now, and her love will ensure that the plants thrive and bloom forever.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

Subscribe

Contact Us

I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting and Sharing Jan’s Love blog.

Flowers Convert Apartment 3B Into a Home

Flowers Convert 3B Into a Home

Thanks to my friend Deb, I have made a giant step in making Apartment 3B my home! Deb, a master gardener and a member of the Hanson Park Conservancy and the Green Thumb Garden Club, helped me select the plants, and she re-potted them.
Richard W. Brown September 28, 2022

Show thread (2)

Richard W. shared a stream on

The Orchid Whisperer

No Green Thumb But Flowers Bloom With Jan's Love!

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 32 seconds
The Orchid Whisperer

The Orchid Whisperer

When Dr. Saksena shared that Jan was cancer-free; I was overcome with gratitude and joy. Though a thoughtful visitor had given Jan a live plant, it was against the rules to have it on the cancer floor. Jan reminded me to take the Orchid home with me.

The Orchid bloomed again after 22 months, thanks to Rabbi Renee's guidance on proper care.

Whenever I see the Orchid, I am reminded of Jan's love for it. Even though I may not have Jan's green thumb, and the Orchid may not bloom again, I will always cherish Jan's passion. True love never fades away.

Richard W. Brown February 7, 2023
Richard W. Brown
Jan and her Orchid!

New Growth and New Blooms

No Green Thumb But Flowers Bloom With Jan's Love!

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 32 seconds

I felt happy after my morning walk when I saw my Peace Lily flourishing. Two new stems were about to bloom, which added to the beauty of the ones that had already blossomed. Although I’m not an expert in plant care, I’m proud to have nurtured them with love and attention. It brings me great pleasure to see them thriving.

My grandmother, a wise woman, once shared that love is the key to a fulfilling life. I strongly believe in this statement, and it led me to meet and marry Jan, who became a source of inspiration and motivation for me. Her love and care went beyond our relationship and extended to my plants. Even though she’s not with me anymore, her love still nourishes and sustains me and my plants.

Remember, love is the secret ingredient that can make all the difference in our lives and the lives of those around us.

Go back to Stream

Share your thoughts and ideas

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund!

Donate Now!
Jan and her Orchid!
×
Jan and her Orchid!
×
Demon Copperhead: A Novel

Read: December 2022

Get this book

Demon Copperhead: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver is a must-read page-turner! Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenage single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.

With more knowledge about the devastation of an economy that works for a few and the opioid crisis, I felt as if I was reading about people I knew. Although the book focuses on the impact on boys, it also details the devastation that girls experience.

If Jan had read Demon Copperhead, she would have encouraged me to read it. It reminds us of the work we must do to repair the world.

As a widow, it was a reminder of the long road that we must all take even after we have hit bottom.

WNYC’s All of it hosted an interview with Barbara Kingsolver in which she speaks about Demon Copperhead and her writing.

Demon Copperhead is one of the NYTimes’ top five fiction books of 2022. I have read three of them, The Candy House, The Furrows, and Checkout 19.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview.

In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damage to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion and, above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

Subscribe

Contact Us

I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.

×
Sea of Tranquility

Read: September 2022

Get this book

Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel has been on my reading list for months. I recommend the book without reservations. Sea of Tranquility is a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space. It was a page-turner from page one.

With the delay of Artemis I, I have been thinking a lot about the Sea of Tranquility, the original lunar landing site. Sea of Tranquility reminded me of the days of my youth when we believed that NASA would colonize the moon as it is in the novel.

One of the passages that moved me was when Olive Llewellyn asked, “What if it always is the end of the world.” A second profound passage asks, “A life lived in a simulation is still a life.”

The Goodreads summary provides a good overview,

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

Subscribe

Contact Us

I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.

×
Everything My Mother Taught Me

Read: December 2022

Get this book

Everything My Mother Taught Me

by Alice Hoffman

I read Everything My Mother Taught Me by Alice Hoffman on the last day of 2022 as I was alone, and I have always admired Ms. Hoffman’s prose. The short story is a haunting short story of loyalty and betrayal, a young woman in early 1900s Massachusetts discovers that in navigating her treacherous coming-of-age, she must find her voice first. I know it is a book that Jan would have enjoyed reading, and I highly recommend it.

Alice Hoffman’s Everything My Mother Taught Me is part of Inheritance’s five stories about secrets, unspoken desires, and dangerous revelations between loved ones. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single setting. By yourself, behind closed doors, or shared with someone you trust. I plan to read more of this series in 2023.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview.

New York Times bestselling author of The Rules of Magic Alice Hoffman crafts a beautiful, heart-wrenching short story. For fatefully observant, Adeline, growing up, carries an ominous warning from her adulterous mother: don’t say a word. Adeline vows never to speak again. Her only secret. After her mother takes a housekeeping job at a  But that’s not lighthouse off the tip of Cape Ann, a local woman vanishes. The key to the mystery lies with Adeline, the silent witness.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

Subscribe

Contact Us

I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.

×
Cloud Atlas: A Novel

Read: September 2024

Get this book

Cloud Atlas: A Novel

by David Mitchell

Today, I started reading Cloud Atlas: A Novel by David Mitchell, one of The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary, voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins treating him for a rare species of brain parasite.

The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, the West Coast in the 1970s, an inglorious present-day England, a Korean superstate of the near future where neo-capitalism has run amok, and, finally, a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn’t end even there. What sets Cloud Atlas apart is its unique narrative structure, which boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. This journey reveals how the disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon. The novel’s diverse settings and cultures, from 1850 Chatham Isles to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii, appeal to readers across the globe, offering a rich and varied reading experience.

×
The School for Good Mothers

Read: February 2023

Get this book

The School for Good Mothers

by Jessamine Chan

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan is a searing page-turner that is also a transgressive novel of ideas about the perils of “perfect” upper-middle-class parenting; the violence enacted upon women by both the state and, at times, one another; the systems that separate families; and the boundlessness of love, The School for Good Mothers introduces, in Frida, an everywoman for the ages.

Although it has been forty-two years since I became a parent, I still remember the anxiety of being a father. What if I could not be a good dad? Fortunately, I never had a bad like Frida. or lived in an age where parents would be sent to “a Big Brother-like institution that measures the success or failure of a mother’s devotion.”

Reading The School for Good Mothers was a reminder that solutions like this are possible unless we are willing to invest in families so that the skills and support are there to resolve any issues in the home. As a widow, I found Frida’s inner dialogue comparable to the early stages of my grief journey—the total isolation and fear of failing dominated my first months of mourning.

The School for Good Mothers had been on my book list since the middle of last year. I recommend it without reservations! Jan would have already read it, and we would be debating its fine points.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

In this taut and explosive debut novel, one lapse in judgement lands a young mother in a government reform program where custody of her child hangs in the balance.

Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn’t have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents’ sacrifices. She can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with Harriet, their cherubic daughter, does Frida finally attain the perfection expected of her. Harriet may be all she has, but she is just enough.

Until Frida has a very bad day.

The state has its eyes on mothers like Frida. The ones who check their phones, letting their children get injured on the playground; who let their children walk home alone. Because of one moment of poor judgment, a host of government officials will now determine if Frida is a candidate for a Big Brother-like institution that measures the success or failure of a mother’s devotion.

Faced with the possibility of losing Harriet, Frida must prove that a bad mother can be redeemed. That she can learn to be good.

Using dark wit to explore the pains and joys of the deepest ties that bind us, Chan has written a modern literary classic.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

Subscribe

Contact Us

I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.

×
The Guest

Read: May 2023

Get this book

The Guest: A Novel

by Emma Cline

The Guest by Emma Cline is a highly recommended book, recognized as one of the top releases for May by The New York Times. At first, I assumed it was just another typical summer romance novel I usually don’t enjoy. However, I was surprised that it was unlike any other beach read I had encountered.

The protagonist, Alex, finds herself in a difficult situation after making a mistake at a dinner party in the East End of Long Island towards the end of summer. The man she’s been staying with dismisses her and sends her back to the city. With limited resources and a waterlogged phone, Alex decides to stay on Long Island and explore her surroundings. She wanders through exclusive neighborhoods and beaches, leaving a trail of destruction behind her.

According to The New York Times, Alex’s days and nights waiting for Labor Day might be “an entertaining series of misguided shenanigans interrupting the upper class’s summer vacation. However, under Cline’s command, every sentence is as sharp as a scalpel, portraying a woman who toes the line between welcome and unwelcome guest and becomes a fully destabilizing force for her hosts and the novel itself.

Although the book has no experience with themes, such as using sex to secure what she desires, as soon as I started reading it, I could not stop. Regardless of my unfamiliarity with the topics, I highly recommend The Guest.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

Subscribe

Contact Us

I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.

×