Going Home

March 4, 2026

What Must It Feel Like to Go Home After Thirty Years? I suppose I’m the perfect author to answer that question, because I did it. Like Emma, in The Mercy Quilt, my latest novel publishing February 24th, I left my hometown seeking adventure when I was 18, only I didn’t flee 1,000 miles, like Emma. I flew 7,300 miles, halfway across the globe. And let me tell you, my Mama was none too happy about it. Although I hopped around many places, I didn’t return to my hometown for 28 years, almost as long as Emma. Nevertheless, I felt that same longing, that tug at the heartstrings. Has that ever happened to you? That guilt at perhaps not making the wisest of choices? I often looked out on the churning seas and imagined that same water crashing on the shoreline back home, and wondered, as Emma must have, would it be too late to return home? After a certain period, as I thought about Emma’s character, I wondered, would it be too long, too overdue for Emma? And thus Emma’s story began.

Emma’s story was never an easy one, although Emma had certainly dreamed of a romantic life. She thought that when she eloped with Jack McDonald, the love of her life, and returned home a married woman, her life would be something of a fairytale. It didn’t quite work out as she hoped when her mother threw a full-blown hissy fit upon her and Jack’s return to Texas. Fannie Lee demanded an immediate divorce, and a few weeks later, Emma discovered she was pregnant. After giving birth to a baby girl, Emma fled to Savannah, Georgia, never to go home.

As the years passed, she dreamed of returning to Texas; but it always seemed like a mere pipe dream, until her sister, Ruth, and her daughter, Savannah Mae, found Emma and returned her to Texas, to the home where she grew up. And what did Emma find when she stepped into the grand house in Waxhachie? Something she didn’t expect. That she was a ghost in her own home; she never imagined it would be so hard to forgive herself for leaving the people who loved her; the people who had waited three decades for her to return. Nervous, as she entered the house, she expected reprimand and resentment. Instead, they treated her with loving kindness, and forgiveness. What was wrong with them, she wondered? Could they not see that she was deeply in the wrong and that she deserved their harshest furor and outrage? And yet, that seemed to never occur to her family, who were only too glad to have her back in their loving arms.

As the days and weeks and months passed, Emma learned to relax and settle back into life in the old house, even resurrecting her love of quilting when she found a battered old quilt in the attic that had been damaged in a historic fire in 1882 that nearly burned down the town of Waxahachie and darn near took the life of Emma’s great-great-grandfather James. Fortunately, great-great-grandmother Lillian’s newly-made Grandmother’s Fan quilt she’d just finished making saved his life by warding off infection by keeping him warm. The old quilt inspired Emma to establish a quilting retreat at the historic home and use the quilt to tell the story of how the quilt helped save both the town and her great-great-grandfather’s life. For the first time in a very very long time, Emma broke out in a smile, walking around with a grin on her face that just wouldn’t go away. She knew exactly what she wanted to do in the house and when she wanted to do it and she wanted to do it right now. First, though, she had to work up a plan. And that would require some brain power, which meant baking cookies, her new favorite hobby. What was it going to be today? Lemon bars? Spice cookies? Pecan Tassies?

If this sounds like just a sweet, simple little story, you’re in for more than a few surprises, and cookies. Dive in for a few ghost stories, romance, and a murder among the patchwork. But first, cookies.