Copyright

      Seasons in Paradise

      Copyright © 2016 Barbara Cameron

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission can be addressed to Permissions, The United Methodist Publishing House, 2222 Rosa L. Parks Blvd., P.O. Box 280988, Nashville, TN, 37228-0988 or e-mailed to [email protected].

      The persons and events portrayed in this work of fiction are the creations of the author, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

      Macro Editor: Teri Wilhelms

      Published in association with Books & Such Literary Agency

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Cameron, Barbara, 1949- author.

      Title: Seasons in Paradise / Barbara Cameron.

      Description: Nashville : Abingdon Press, [2016] | Series: Coming home series ; book 2

      Identifiers: LCCN 2016009636| ISBN 9781426771927 (softcover) | ISBN

      9781501827341 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCSH: Amish—Fiction. | Man-woman relationships—Fiction. | Paradise (Lancaster

      County, Pa.)—Fiction. | GSAFD: Christian fiction. | Love stories.

      Classification: LCC PS3603.A4473 S43 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016009636

      John 14:2 in chapter 17 is from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press.

      Dedication

      For my cousin Deb

      Acknowledgments

      Acknowledgments

      To everything there is a season . . .

      The farm my mother and her eight siblings grew up on in Indiana has been the inspiration for the farms I write about in my books. I vividly remember watching my Uncle Harvey, the youngest in the family, ride his tractor in his fields. His wife, my Aunt Delores, made the family welcome whenever they visited, and that can’t have been easy given the number of family members who descended on the farm for vacations. She has often been the inspiration for the female characters who make a home so welcome, who make family keep wanting to go home. Aunt Delores made a little bedroom under the eaves of the second story so welcome for the many nieces and nephews who visited. She even kept a small toy chest that had belonged to my mom and her twin sister stocked with toys and let us choose one each time we came.

      I was sitting on the grass near the road one day when I saw my first Amish buggy and became fascinated with the Amish.

      Memories of how that farm looked so different from season to season inspired this story, the second in the Coming Home series. It starts in spring and ends up in winter, at Christmas, the holiest of holidays.

      When people think of Christmas they usually think of home. But I got to wondering what happens if home is a place you’ve had to avoid? What happens then? My hero, Sam, has had to leave his Amish home and live in the Englisch world. Mary Elizabeth, the woman who loves him, believes he needs to return to his community and his faith—and her—and it will take her seasons to do so.

      Thank you to my editor, Ramona Richards, for continuing to believe in my stories, and thank you to Teri Wilhelm, my macro editor, and everyone at Abingdon Press who helps produce beautiful covers and proofread and distribute . . . oh, so many people and so many jobs, I’ll never be able to thank everyone.

      Thank you, dear reader, for choosing my books.

      And thank You, God, for taking my hand and helping me tell a story of faith and love.

      Chapter 1

      1

      Mary Elizabeth always thought there was nothing lovelier than springtime in Paradise, Pennsylvania.

      Today the sky was a rich blue, not the gray it had been for too long this winter. The clouds that scudded overhead were soft clumps and a pure white, not heavy and dark and spitting snow or rain.

      A warm breeze carried the scents of flowers and plants and . . .

      Manure and fertilizer.

      Her nose wrinkled as she stood on the back porch of her schweschder Lavina’s big old farmhouse and watched David, Lavina’s mann, working with his bruders, Sam and John, fertilizing the fields.

      Well, to be honest, she watched Sam, not the other men. Sam and John came nearly every weekend now that spring planting was taking place in Lancaster County. It took all three of the bruders as well as occasional help from their dat, Amos, to do the planting, as would the eventual nurturing of the crop. It would take the four of them and some of the men from the community to harvest come November.

      Mary Elizabeth had begun to think Amos would never turn the farm over to his eldest sohn, David, and her schweschder Lavina. David had finally despaired at fighting with his dat. Amos had been so difficult he’d driven David, then Sam and John away.

      David had returned to Paradise to help his mudder take care of his dat when he got the cancer. No one had been more surprised than David and Lavina when Amos had a change of heart after recovering and decided to turn the farm over to his sohn.

      Mary Elizabeth knew she would never forget this Christmas past when Sam and John walked into her haus and surprised both families after an absence of more than a year. But that return was brief and temporary.

      It was a miracle, she’d thought, when they came to celebrate the birth of the Christ child that night. But her hopes that Sam would stay had been dashed just hours later. The two bruders went back to their apartment in town that night.

      Both Sam and John said it was wunderbaar that their dat had recovered and they were thrilled that David would take over the family farm. But they refused to return home or to the Amish community the bruders had grown up in.

      Mary Elizabeth had thought her heart was broken when Sam followed David out of the community, but that Christmas night she’d found it was possible for her heart to be broken a second time.

      So now she watched Sam working in the fields she knew he loved but would leave after supper