Fallen Leaves

Beautiful Grace DeLong Wilber had never met her famous father, the US Ambassador to Japan. He had died of typhoid when her mother, Elida, was still pregnant. But of all the DeLong children it was Grace who was the most devoted to his memory, and determined that his legacy would not slip into history unknown. So on a beautiful summer day in 1921, after a tumultuous marriage that had ended badly, a cataclysmic earthquake, and the death of her cherished mother, she packed her three grown children and her son's fiancée into her extravagant Pierce Arrow automobile and began a journey to establish a fitting memorial for her father. She did not know that journey would forever alter the course of the entire DeLong family. This fictional work based upon actual events and persons is a study of great love, endurance, tragedy and new beginnings set against a backdrop of the sheer splendor that was San Francisco and Fallen Leaf Lake in the 1920's.