Red Is for Roses

Some decades ago, a man fled for his life swimming across the Danube River. Life behind the Iron Curtain was rife with pain and fear. Red seemed to paint swatches across moments in his life. Communism, love, heartbreak. Apples formed his early memory and way of life. Strawberries tore him away from his home in Bulgaria. Roses in his New York greenhouse helped heal wounds caused by life’s cruelties. As with her father, red also seemed to weave through Lisa’s life. Cranberries over Thanksgiving reignited the longing to find her family, placing this desire in God’s hands. Poppies bloomed amidst the revival of a newfound family. Cherries demonstrated the unfailing strength of Lisa’s father and how “what was once lost, was now found.” The last time Lisa saw her father, she was 11. Yet the yearning to see her family restored never waned. It took years until finally, a letter arrived in a language she couldn’t understand. Decades later, a leaf appeared on a genealogy website. Lisa discovered she had only scratched the surface of her family an ocean and a continent away.

Author Biography

‘Lisa was born in 1967 in Buffalo, New York. After graduating from high school in her hometown, she studied Business Administration at Erie Community College – City Campus and The School of Management at the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNYAB). She has worked in various roles as a Project Controls Specialist and Program Scheduler in the Consulting Engineering and Space and Defense industries. She resides with her husband and son in Buffalo, New York. Vanya was born in 1960 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. After graduating from high school in her hometown, she studied librarianship and bibliography at the State Library Institute (now the University of Library Studies) in Sofia. She has worked as a librarian in the Processing Department and Catalogs of the Ivan Vazov National Library in Plovdiv (1986 – 2016). Since 2016, she has been the Head of the Library Center at the European Higher School of Economics and Management – Plovdiv. Natasha Fernando is the founder of The BARN Chronicles, a company that specializes in capturing your memoir, it’s about recognizing that your story deserves to be told. Words are indelible. So are you. Visit www.thebarnicles.org or email thebarnicles1@gmail.com for more details – and find out what BARN stands for!