Saving Grace – A Story of Adoption
L. B. Johnson
Author Bio
L.B. Johnson is the author of the #1 Amazon Best Selling Memoirs “The Book of Barkley – Love and Life Through the Eyes of a Labrador Retriever” (2014) and “Saving Grace – A Story of Adoption” (2015).
She grew up in the mountains of the Western United States where she was adopted with another child by a retired Air Force Officer and Military LEO and a Deputy Sheriff, an upbringing that brought with it both resilience and a healthy respect for the outcomes of risk. After graduation from college, she took to the skies in a career as a jet pilot. But puzzles larger than what was in her crew meal drew her back to a university setting where she earned a doctorate in a Criminal Justice related field. It is a field in which she now works, hanging up her wings for good. Additional mayhem is provided by her husband and two rambunctious grandchildren. L.B. lives in Chicago with her family and rescue dog named Abby. Active in animal rescue and adoption non profits, all of the proceeds for her books are donated to animal rescue groups such as the Humane Society, Lab Rescue L.R.C.P., Blind Dog Alliance and Search Dog Foundation.
Description
Saving Grace started as a journal the author wrote for her daughter after she gave her up for adoption as a teen. It wasn’t anything structured; just notes here and there of thoughts and stories of her birth as well as the author’s life coming to age with the brother she was adopted with. In a series of vignettes of life and memories carefully crafted from those notes after the sudden death of her brother – it is the story of an extended family, both two and four legged, formed only of love, one that may mirror your own.
It started with a piece of paper–a birth certificate, sent to the author’s parents long after her birth. There is much history in that piece of paper. For she was born to an unwed teenage mother in the generation prior to Roe v. Wade, on a warm day in August-a small, painful beginning in which she had been an unwilling participant, yet one that would shape her destiny. She is adopted into a loving home with another child that would become her beloved brother, it is a life unfettered, in a generation of newly found freedoms. But with such freedoms come a price and with fate comes new challenges. Her mother losing her battle with cancer, her brother leaving the nest for military service, she falls in love for the first time, only to find herself pregnant. She’s a teen and a college student, abandoned at the news. The options are obvious, but there is only one decision she could make: to give her child up to a family praying for one, and walking away. The ensuing years are not always easy as she learns not only
to rescue homeless animals but herself. But they are lessons learned and chances to connect with others that become our family.
Saving Grace is more than a story of adoption. It’s a deep look into family-at hope and faith and why we end our days surrounded by souls that may not bear our name or share our blood, but who are our true family.
Book excerpt
It wasn’t long before the freedom of those bicycles was replaced with the freedom of a car. I remember those days as if it were yesterday; driving way too fast past streams that ran out of the higher elevations, veins that let the mountain bleed. The water rushed, tumbled, and raced to its destiny, to be drunk deeply or left to stagnate in a secluded pool. The sky would break out in articulate warmth there on those last days of the conceit of winter.
It was when I learned about freedom and speed, the year I learned to drive. It was the year in which I first learned about the hard outcome of choice.
I was always captured by movement, machinery, and speed; and now there were keys in my hand, a vehicle just waiting to take all of our compressed heat and explode it into sound. I started slowly, learning the basics, and then to drive in snow, gradually picking up speed. It wasn’t long before my friends were driving with bigger, faster cars, and the speed would increase. We even found a road where, if you hit this rise just so and at a certain speed and angle, you could go airborne.
We drove off into the hills with that sense of immortality that only the very young and the very stupid seem to have. Driving without fear, without thought, sacrificing only some rubber and the occasional fender to the gods of the roads. We were teens; there were tears and drama, hookups and breakups. It was the season of curving roads and youth; where we were immortal with no adult responsibilities to block that open road.
On those free afternoons we’d pile in the cars, heading up into the hills to seek the source of the water and ride it on down. Cresting the hills with windows open, the wind as fluid, hot, and hard as love, a swift current that will pull you under to drown, gasping. We’d drive for miles with just the sensation of rushing space as deep as the water. We’d drive until dark, unrelenting and unrepentant, curfews nipping at our heels, leaving in our wake only the sound of cicadas and the breathing of night taking in the remnant smell of high octane.
Soon enough there would be graduation and college, likely sans car to cut expenses. These days would vanish with a befitting and hollow sound, which would fall for only a moment upon us, with the dreadful hush of motion stopped too abruptly to mourn. Adulthood looming where vehicles became simply transportation again, something to shuffle kids around, a conveyance to work. We could not comprehend that someday, for many, life would become an emptying suitcase of enthusiasm. We swore if we ever had to buy a station wagon, we’d kill ourselves.
We had our future, we had our past; and in those moments, as wheels hit the pavement and gravel flew, sometimes we had both at once.
Author Website
http://lbjohnsonauthor.blogspot.com/
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