Our Story

47 Homes, One
Enduring Love

 

This memoir provides a rare map for living: how to make a home wherever you land, how to renovate with heart and hands, and how to let intuition open doors you never expected. Each chapter is a place-driven vignette—Oregon tides, Hawaiian light, Costa Rican rains, Alaskan cold —woven with the everyday work of gardening, fixing, and making room for wonder.

 

What makes this memoir special is its blend of sensory travel writing, practical DIY detail, and a steady spiritual throughline about trust and gratitude. Readers who love travel memoirs, place-driven love stories, hands-on renovation tales, or quiet spiritual uplift will find themselves comforted, inspired, and ready to act.

 

Read this book and learn how trusting your ideas—and each other—can remake a life and create small, repeating miracles.

 

Ebook $4.99, Print with color images $32.00

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“This is a very special book–an authentic 41-year love story and true partnership that weathers poverty, danger and continual reinvention. It is also a story of faith in God and faith in the Tao—a belief that if you listen to and act in alignment with the natural flow of life rather than forcing outcomes you will experience small miracles. This involves practicing simplicity, spontaneity, and humility. You do this by listening and trusting the “still quiet voice” inside you.

It’s written like a diary, but with both practical and spiritual life lessons learned as Mary Jo and Tom move 47 times in their 41-year marriage. Those lessons are rendered using a blend of practical, hands-on renovations of each place they live, providing beautiful gardening details, and vivid, sensory place writing (Oregon, Hawaii, Costa Rica, Alaska, small-town America and more) that reads like a travelogue while always emphasizing that home is defined by relationship, service and creative work; not by permanence or material stability.” –Maggie L.

More reviews coming soon

Book cover for Our Story by Mary Jo and Tom Ten Pas. Cover features them sitting on a concrete bench near a lake, their backs turned to the camera.
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