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GREENSBORO — It started for Beth Almy 18 months ago in a Walmart parking lot.

There she was, in her red Ford Explorer, with her three kids in the back seat, when these words came tumbling all at once.

Exotic.

Explore.

Hustle.

Hush.

A little odd, she knew. But she couldn’t shake it. She works at the Natural Science Center, and she sees — and hears — the animals almost every day.

But that day, in the parking lot, she thought about what those animals would say if they could talk.

She started writing on anything she could find.

A napkin.

An envelope.

And she didn’t stop.

That night, as her husband cat-napped beside her, she sat up in bed, with her laptop across her knees. Until 4 in the morning, her husband heard the tap-tap-tap of a keyboard.

Now, Almy has always been imaginative. She’s a former first-grade teacher who painted murals, worked with interior designers and sold rocking horses and other furniture she painted.

But this was different. She wanted to write a children’s book, and she needed help. So, she turned to another teacher, her Aunt Charlotte.

After 25 years in an Arizona high school, Charlotte Searls had picked up a paintbrush and discovered she loved letting colors play on paper.

But Searls had painted only people, not animals. And Almy worried her aunt would say no. No matter. During a visit to North Carolina, right there at her kitchen table, Almy asked the question that had nagged her for months.

“Aunt Charlotte, have you ever thought about painting animals?”

That kitchen-table conversation started Almy’s first endeavor into publishing. She recruited her aunt as the illustrator, and she looked for a second job to pay for her book because of her husband’s words of caution that hung in her head.

“We can’t go into debt over this.”

He was right.

Then, out of the blue, an interior designer friend Almy had worked with in the past called. She needed help; Almy said yes. For eight months, Almy plastered and faux-painted Greensboro’s newest high-dollar houses.

She worked double shifts. She’d spend time as the educational resources coordinator at the center and later scoot to a construction site to tackle a project.

Then, she’d go back to the center with paint on her face and plaster in her hair and hear her co-workers say, “Oh, we know what you were doing today.’’

Yes, they did. She’d been 16 feet up, sometimes in 20-degree weather, in an unfinished, unheated house, saying over and over to herself, like a favorite song lyric: “This is all for a good reason. This is all for a good reason.”

In eight months, after saving every penny she could, Almy pocketed $10,000.

“Do you really want to write a book with that?’’ asked her husband Charles.

Almy knew home-improvement projects never wane. She has a hole in her deck 10 feet wide to remind her of that. But she knew she wanted to publish a book that reminded people about the imprint animals have on their hearts.

She published 2,500 copies of “Faces of the Earth” under her Wishflower Press and gave 500 to the Natural Science Center. The center will keep all the profits from the books it sells.

Almy’s book is as lyrical as a poem, and it gives a human voice to the animals we can see every day under the trees on Lawndale Drive.

But watch her read it to a dozen fifth-graders who pop her with questions. Or hear her youngest, Nicholas, a first-grader, pop her with this: “Mom, guess what? You’re an author. That’s really cool.”

Yes, it is. And it sprang from, of all places, a Walmart parking lot.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com