The Garden God Gave Me

About the Book

As Pamela sits heartbroken in her favorite chair following the death of her beloved husband, Takis, she attempts to unravel the layers of her existence whose very first memory could have been her last. We follow her through her cinematic reality, rewinding time and space, to the orange groves of Kalamata, Greece, when Nazis bombed the harbor forcing her family to flee across the Taygetos Mountain Range to a small Spartan village for safety. As fate would have it, they came face to face with Nazi atrocities instead. Their survival in an underground cave was threatened when German soldiers were heard standing at the roof of the opening, laughing at the occupiers’ successful conflagration of Soustianous the night before. Desperate to flee the danger, her family searched for new shelter and a new beginning which came at a price, not all the family survived.

As World War II ended and Greece rebuilt, the family moved back to Kalamata where Pamela lived the monotony of a poor teenager until a soccer-playing banker named Takis crossed her path. The Andriopoulos family’s American Dream interrupted the couple’s love affair when they were separated for years by the Atlantic Ocean, their only connection was their love letters. Pamela returned to Kalamata to marry her soulmate who followed the love of his life back to Chicago for a taste of the American Pie. Their fairytale was not laid in a bed of roses, but rather thorns and weeds and unconditional love, all of God’s will. Pamela and Takis’ family thrived in the States, but Kalamata, and its people, continued to tug at their hearts, calling them back to their Greek Dream. But the vision for their family was shattered with broken memories that could not be recovered, so it seemed.

About the Author

Pamela Coumas is a neophyte narrator fulfilling a lifelong dream of two people to chronicle an unlikely love affair that began in the seaside town of Kalamata, Greece to the shores of America, and back again. Educated in the school of life, earning a master’s degree in agape with a minor in optimism, her greatest accomplishment is found in the pages of this book. The story narrates wartime horrors, peacetime inspiration, and adolescent ambitions to raising a family, empty nesting, coping with a spouse’s dementia, and loving of the divine kind.

Pamela’s life is an extraordinary story of an ordinary woman whose journeys traveled rough waters, calm seas, and a whirlwind of uncommon experiences. The Garden God Gave Me is a tale of innocence, hope, devotion, perseverance, and above all, faith in God’s will. The book is dedicated to Takis B. Coumas, her late husband, with whom she dreamt of writing their love story together someday. She wrote it together with her daughter, Angela C. DiVito, in his honor instead, and for the Glory of God.