This is how my love for her goes on: in moments remembered and moments imagined. It’s how I keep her alive. Hers is the voice in my head, my conscience. I see the world, at least in part, through her eyes. Her story – which is the story of a time and land and the indomitable will of a people – is my story; two lives woven together, and like any good story, ours will begin and end and begin again. Love is what remains.
Love is what remains when everything else is gone. This is what I should have told my children when we left Texas. What I will tell them tonight. Not that they will understand yet. How could they? I am forty years old, and I only just learned this fundamental truth myself. Love. In the best of times, it is a dream. In the worst of times, a salvation.
We fought, we struggled, we hurt each other, so what? That’s what love is, I think. It’s all of it. Tears, anger, joy, struggle. Mostly, it’s durable. It lasts.
Elsa felt a deeply rooted shame in her daughter’s rejection. In her hurt, she did what she’d always done: she disappeared. But all the while, she waited, prayed, that both her husband and her daughter would someday see how much she loved them and they would love her in return. Until then, she dared not push too hard or demand too much.
Leni felt the sudden fragility of her world, of the world itself. She barely remembered Before. Maybe she didn’t remember it at all, in fact. Maybe the images she did have-Dad lifting her onto his shoulders, pulling petals from a daisy, holding a buttercup to her chin, reading her a bedtime story-maybe these were all images she’d taken from pictures and imbued with an imagined life.
When a man resorts to violence, he’s scared,” Jack said. “That’s a good sign.
The best mirror is an old friend. – GEORGE HERBERT.
She knew it was wrong to be angry with her mother now – the weather wasn’t her fault – but Loreda couldn’t help herself. She was mad at the world, and somehow that meant shew as mad at her mom most of all.
They’d had no choice but to fall into the cycle the growers wanted them in: living on credit, building up debt, and never making enough, even with relief, to break out.
History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit, In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another – what we have in common – that will save us.
There was a pain that came with constant disapproval; a sense of having lost something unnamed, unknown.
People left, and if you loved too deeply, too fiercely, their swift and sudden absence could chill you to the soul.
I don’t have a good history with men.” “You know the thing about history, Elsa? It’s over. Already dead and gone.” “They say people who don’t heed history are doomed to repeat it.
Think about the women who fought for the vote. They had to be scared, too, but they marched for change, even if it meant going to jail. And now we can vote. Sometimes the end is worth any sacrifice.
I guess my mama was right about love. As screwed up as she is, she understands the durability and lunacy of it. You can’t make yourself fall in love, I suppose, and you can’t make yourself fall out of it.
It’s not weak, you know. To feel things deeply, to want things. To need.
There’s no substitute for talking to the people you love. Thinking about them, dreaming about them, wishing things were different.
Her story – which is the story of a time and land and the indomitable will of a people – is my story; two lives woven together, and like any good story, ours will begin and end and begin again.
And when we let the media choose our heroes for us, we are lost already.
Hope is a coin I carry; an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times in my journey when it and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.