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Our Lady of the Lost and Found: A Novel of Mary, Faith, and Friendship
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About Our Lady Of The Lost And Found: A Novel Of
Product Description One Monday morning in April, a middle-aged writer walks into her living room to water the plants and finds a woman standing beside her potted fig tree. Dressed in a navy blue trench coat and white Nikes, the woman introduces herself as "Mary. Mother of God.... You know. Mary." Instead of a golden robe or a crown, she arrives bearing a practical wheeled suitcase. Weary after two thousand years of adoration and petition, Mary is looking for a little R & R. She's asked in for lunch, and decides to stay a week. As the story of their visit unfolds, so does the story of Mary-one of the most complex and powerful female figures of our time-and her changing image in culture, art, history, as well as the thousands of recorded sightings that have placed her everywhere from a privet hedge to the dented bumper of a Camaro. As this Everywoman and Mary become friends, their conversations, both profound and intimate, touch upon Mary's significance and enduring relevance. Told with humor and grace, Our Lady of the Lost and Found is an absorbing tour through Mary's history and a thoughtful meditation on spirituality, our need for faith, and our desire to believe in something larger than ourselves. Review "A graceful novel...lovely, clever [and] imaginative." — The Wall Street Journal "A clever hybrid of religious fairy tale and straight up spiritual inquest, this visitation of the blessed virgin is a holy hoot." —Elle About the Author Diane Schoemperlen is the author of Our Lady of the Lost and Found; In the Language of Love; and five short story collections, including Forms of Devotion, which won the Governor General's Award for Fiction in 1998; and The Man of My Dreams, which was nominated for a Governor General's Award and a Trillium Award. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Signs Looking back on it now, I can see there were signs. In the week before it happened, there was a string of unusual events that I noticed but did not recognize. Seemingly trivial, apparently unconnected, they were not even events really, so much as odd occurrences, whimsical coincidences, amusing quirks of nature or fate. It is only now, in retrospect, that I can see them for what they were: eclectic clues, humble omens, whispered heralds of the approach of the miraculous. These were nothing like the signs so often reported by other people who have had similar experiences. The sun did not pulsate, spin, dance, or radiate all the colors of the rainbow. There were no rainbows. There were no claps of thunder and no bolts, balls, or sheets of lightning. There were no clouds filled with gold and silver stars. The moon did not split in two, the earth did not tremble, and the rivers did not flow backward. A mil-lion rose petals did not fall from the sky and ten thousand blue butterflies did not flock around my head. There were no doves. There were no advance armies of angels. There was not even one angel, unless you care to count the squirrel. Three mornings in a row a fat black squirrel with one white ear came and balanced on the flower box at my kitchen window. It was the middle of April. There was nothing in the box but last year's dirt, hard-packed and dense with the ingrown roots of flowers long-gone to the compost pile. It would soon be time to refill them with fresh soil and plant the annuals: impatiens, lobelia, some hanging vines. The squirrel appeared on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, each morning at seven o'clock. I sat at the kitchen table in my nightgown and housecoat, drinking coffee and reading The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende for the second time. I had read it when it first came out a dozen years before, and had picked it off the shelf again on impulse, without wondering why it suddenly seemed important to read it again. I was enjoying it even more the second time around. The squirrel sat on the edge of the window box nibbling on something that looked suspiciously like a tulip bulb from the
