Barely twenty-two years of age, the angelic young bride showed early symptoms of schizophrenia on the eve of their wedding. Yet Mack never allowed his wife's condition to deter him from becoming the most effective preacher that he could. God had long ago forgiven Mack with the first prayer of repentance, but the difficulty lay in not forgiving himself when temptation blindsided him in the most unforeseen circumstances. His deep love for and commitment to his God kept him faithfully pressing on to rise above the obstacles he faced in becoming the preacher that God had called him to be and that his supportive congregation believed he could be. The Lingering Cloud was written during the author's eighty-fifth year. With twelve years of healing since his wife's death, he felt he had reached a level of maturity to write this narrative as it should be written.
About the Author: It all began before daybreak on a February morning in 1928, in a house that was far too well ventilated in winter's cold. I fell in love with books at an early age because my mother, a gifted reader, carried us four kids and my father to worlds far different from our world of the 1930's. Though I grumbled about having to go to school, I loved it, but had enough smarts not to admit it. On graduating from high school, I found a small Methodist college that offered me room, board, and tuition in exchange for work. Early in my sophomore year, I was given work I fell in love with in the college library. Because I wanted to become a thinker, for reasons I still don't understand, I spent a great deal of time reading philosophy, sometimes to the detriment of a higher GPA. I had wanted to write since my mid-teens, but there were lots of things I wanted to do. To marry my first love as soon as I had a secure job as a teacher, and to become a school counselor because I'd been the sort of kid that surely needed one at times. A trip to Mobile, Alabama and I fell in love with azaleas and camellias. Rhododendrons in North Carolina and it was love at first sight. Nothing would do but that I start growing them. But "It can't be done in the steamy, hot summers where you live," I was told. For eighteen years I marketed about twenty varieties that had been propagated and grown on my twenty-one acres of wooded property. A good many of my rhododendron plants make their home at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, granting me a lifetime membership in the Botanical Society. Too many hours fishing and daydreaming about fishing, and I still had not written my novel. There were just too many things I loved to do. Eventually, I became my wife's caregiver. Alzheimer's disease was destroying her brain. The once bright lights of her mind were going out . . . one at a time, never to return. My first novel was written during Alzheimer's advanced stage and published years after her death. During my eighty-fifth year, I wrote a second novel, The Lingering Cloud, a story I could not have told ten years earlier. What would have been difficult to write in my seventies now flows far easier. My third novel, Memories from the Great Depression, is becoming far different from the other stories I've read of that era (1929-1939). Afterward? More novels! If God continues to grant me the health and the time . . . I get excited just thinking about it! So far, it's been one heckuva ride!