What a burden such a choice must be. For the first time, she saw her own childhood as an adult, from far away, with the wisdom this war had given her.
Memories came crashing through the walls she’d built to contain them.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” Mrs. Quisdorf said, nodding. “That’s the general idea. Who’s to say if it actually works, though.
For the whole of their lives he’d been like one of the apple trees on this property. Sturdy and dependable.
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.” “Who says that? I ain’t never heard it. I say folks who hang on to the past miss their chance for a future.
The difference between Loreda and her mother wasn’t fear – they shared that. It was fire. Her mother’s passion had gone out.
Loreda wanted to be angry. What had Jack said to her the first day they met? You have fire in you, kid. Don’t let the bastards snuff it out. Something like that. Loreda didn’t want to be the kind of woman who suffered in silence. Refused to be.
Jack believed in things and fought to make the world a better place. He was the kind of man a girl could count on.
We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us. – MARCEL PROUST.
Hope is a fragile thing, easily broken if handled too much.
She refused to let one man’s prejudice hurt them after all they’d been through to get here. She was angry that Loreda and Ant had experienced such baseless prejudice, but life was full of such injustice.
Elsa stared at her overstuffed bookcase. Books lay on top, were stacked on the floor beside it. More books covered her nightstand. Asking her to choose among them was like having to choose between air and water.
A girl without a mother was a prisoner of a different kind.
And what would she have to show for her life? How would her time on this earth be marked? Who would remember her, and for what?
Sunlight changed all that, and in May, when the rains paused, bright pink and purple azaleas bloomed overnight, and everywhere was lime-green new growth – on the lawns, in the shoots of fragile leaves along the roadsides.
Loreda didn’t want the kind of love that trapped. She wanted to be told she could fly high, be anything and go anywhere.
No one would want to live this way, and yet here they were. The Great Depression.
Remember, cara, hard times don’t last. Land and family do.” TWELVE In November, the first winter storm battered them from the north, leaving behind a fine layer of snow.
Life was like that, full of quicksilver changes. Joy reappeared as unexpectedly as sunlight.
Hope was such a dangerous thing, so ephemeral and amorphous; it didn’t fit in the concrete world of words spoken aloud.