I wrote Sunset under the Poet's Tree over a two-year period, overshadowing the eighteen-year war that breast cancer inflicted upon my wife of thirty-four years. She lost her life to it on January 17, 2011. My experience of being a registered nurse for forty-two years gave the book a unique perspective. There are two stories within Sunset under the Poet's Tree, which are both parallel and congruent. It is the biography of Lois A. Anderson beginning around 1959 (before I met her), with vignettes of my childhood, exemplifying the times to which we were exposed, and ending in early 2011, when she passed away. The other story is fictional. The medieval setting begins the story in well-established villages, founded close to an ancient wall of stones. The villages, scattered from the northern borders to the southern ice lands, continue only into the expansive western terrain, ending where the ocean begins. From there, the villages disappear in the bleak desolate mountains north of the last settled village of Emansupass, and then into the southernmost villages of Rossland and beyond. In the eastern regions is a gigantic stone wall, running from its origins in the northern ice-covered mountains to its endpoint in the southern ice lands. Behind it lies a secret, sleeping and hidden for centuries.
