Purple Violets

An Excerpt: 

Ellen Winona Crandall was a woman, a mother, and an angel. As a young child, she lived with a total absence of endearment in a family overrun with alcoholism and mental illness. The hope of finding affection of any kind was made impossible at the hands of her insufferable grandmother. The only solace she found was from writing pensive musings in a damaged diary and the purple African Violets resting on her bedroom windowsill. 

After years of abuse and neglect, she gave her shattered heart to a man who had nothing to offer but deceit, a cheating heart, and disdain for their only child, a son named out of respect for the wishes of her dying father, Edwin. What began as typical conformance between a son and his mother was followed by years of family conflict, neglect, and intemperance. Consequently, Edwin initiated a relentless pursuit for his mother’s love and acceptance. Left with unresolved issues, he faced an adulthood barren of the imperative love from the most important woman in a man’s life. Living without that love left him sorrowful and unfulfilled. Through his deep devotion, tenacity, and grim persistence, a lifetime of unspoken love ensued between a mistrustful and unforgiving mother and a devoted son. Several mysterious occurrences and thought-provoking questions ultimately result in a turbulent confrontation between him and his mother as she reveals a secret that tears his world apart once again.   

 In the 1920s, the world was recovering from one of the greatest pandemics ever known to man — the Spanish Flu. It infected 27 % of the world’s population and killed fifty million people. In that same decade, the American auto industry was born, the sale of alcohol was prohibited, women won the right to vote, and the sun still cast its radiant energy upon American soil. Those years also brought forth numerous household innovations, the signing into law of the Social Security Act by President Roosevelt, and a life of unconstrained abundance for many, but not for eight-year-old Ellen Winona Crandall and her family. She just woke up from her all-too-familiar “uncelebrated” birthday, a young child forced to live with her cruel and impertinent grandmother next door. Despite her mother Winona’s inconsequential pleas, her inebriant father Edwin, made a reckless decision to stick her there since she was the oldest, and there wasn’t sufficient room in their house for her and sisters Dorothy and Emilia. He was a man known by the townspeople as a lazy, hen-pecked drunk, and for some unknown reason, he despised Italians. Before he died, he willed that the first of his daughters to give birth to a son would have to bear his name. 

Ellen was petite, fair-skinned, with Auburn hair, freckles, and eyes distinct with desperation to escape a life of despair.  while clinging to the bits of contentment she hid in her secret places. She would always remember her father as a quick-tempered, sickly, and unaffectionate man. Her mother, also known to drink in excess, was a hard-working woman and, like most of her ancestors, could not manifest affection at any level. Ellen and her unadorned sisters would never escape the bondage of genetically infused alcohol consumption.    

Like many poor families in the village living in a nebulous consumer society, they were derided by many for living in “Shantytown” and considered outcasts, but this was still not a sufficient reason to leave Ellen’s birthday uncelebrated.

Violets, so precious and so loved by my beloved mother 💜

Blessings, my dearly beloved,