I notice much has changed in my plot since being here. My post from back in August of last year has some major inaccuracies and I will correct them here. The first major change is the title, which now reads, The Forest Through the Trees. Here is the latest rendition!
We are first introduced to Sophia, an 84-year-old spirited, yet gentle woman, who has lived the majority of her life in the United States, a successful author of many children's stories which have instilled countless young minds with the knowledge they are loved and cherished. Her husband of nearly sixty years has passed away, and she now feels it is time to write the story that has been patiently waiting inside her all that time, respectfully remaining unwritten, according to her late husband's wishes. But as she begins, she quickly realizes this story, though it had recently been aching to be written, was going to take a little further effort on her part to coax out. She knew she had to return to the land of her childhood summers, the years she met and befriended her future husband, and the events leading up to her entire family's exodus from their ancestral estate.
Traveling back to Ireland, she brings with her her granddaughter, who, like so many young people recently finishing college, was a bit adrift and waiting for her life's purpose to pay her a visit. Isabel had always been a source of joy for Sophia, and her international traveling during her senior year made her the perfect candidate of the family to accompany her grandmother on a visit to her homelands.
Returning to find the house in ruin was harder than Sophia imagined, but it was made easier by the care and attention that had obviously been continually paid to the surrounding gardens. While visiting the old estate, they lunch at the new cafe recently opened and meet a keeper of the grounds who surprises Sophia by showing her some old papers found in the basement. Most were ruined over years of damp, but one box in particular seemed to survive just to save itself for Sophia these many years later.
Sophia carefully opens the box to find her old journals and notebooks she had to leave behind. This, she instantly knows, is why she came back. And so she begins her adventure of rediscovering the youth she once was, before all innocence was stripped away and the mystery of family never existed within her comfortable walls of naive ignorance. Not yet knowing what is to become of it all, she begins to write.
