Outskirts Press, INC.

They claimed the wars were over. Again.

In the disruptive thirty years, 1945 to 1975, each decade watched exhausted soldiers return to their waiting wives, children. These men were not the same men they had been before they set boots on foreign dirt, no matter where the dirt lay: Europe, Asia, or the Middle East. Holgate Farms, a postwar development of small bungalows welcomed these fractured families. By 1970, the landscape had matured and the houses needed paint. A green hedge between two of the lots had grown monstrous, out-of-control. Patsy and Eleanor, gold star wives from different wars, one white the other brown, live on either side of the hedge, and they both feel unsafe, not only because of the isolation of their houses, but because of the damaged men and needy children in those houses. The two women meet first through a ragged break in the hedge, discover their unexpected commonalities, and decide to do something about the unwieldy bushes. In repairing the hedge, they build the support and strength they need to face and repair their lives.