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Time doesn’t stop. Your life doesn’t stop and wait until you get ready to start living it.
And we would hear also a sermon in which poor Brother Preston would struggle again with his terrible duty and need to bring comfort to the comfortless, to say something in public that could answer the private fear and grief that were all around him, and he would mostly fail. We would shake his hand at the door as we went out, trying, I suppose, to console him for his wish to help what only could be endured.
And that was a hope almost as fearful as hopelessness.
Happiness had a way of coming to you and making you sad. You would think, “There seems to have been a time when I deserved such a happiness and needed it, like a day’s pay, and now I have no use for it at all.” How can you be happy, how can you live, when all the things that make you happy grieve you nearly to death?
But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.
I was grateful because I knew, even in my fear and grief, that my life had been filled with gifts.
To know that I was known by a new living being, who had not existed until she was made in my body by my desire and brought forth into the world by my pain and strength—that changed me.
You see the house in its shady yard, the barns and other buildings, and the broad, long ridge rising beyond. What you won’t see, but what I see always, is the pattern of our life here that made and kept it as you see it now, all the licks and steps and rounds of work, all the comings and goings, all the days and years. A lifetime’s knowledge shimmers on the face of the land in the mind of a person who knows. The history of a place is the mind of an old man or an old woman who knows it, walking over it, and it is never fully handed on to anybody else, but has been mostly lost, generation after
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The hardest resentments to give up are the ones you felt knowingly as a child,
You can see that it is hard to mark the difference between our life and our place, our place and ourselves.
Importance of place. Place as a character
It is hard to say what it means to be at work and thinking of a person you loved and love still who did that same work before you and who taught you to do it. It is a comfort ever and always, like hearing the rhyme come when you are singing a song.
The chance you had is the life you’ve got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, even about your children being gone, but you mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
I knew she had sense, but I was afraid she wouldn’t use it when she needed it. Even then, I think, I knew I was spending too much time telling her things she had already figured out for herself. But I couldn’t bear not to tell her, and she couldn’t bear to hear me. Later, when she finally was grown up and we were friends again, she said that what infuriated her the most was knowing she agreed with me.
To be the mother of a grown-up child means that you don’t have a child anymore, and that is sad. When the grown-up child leaves home, that is sadder. I wanted Margaret to go to college, but when she actually went away it broke my heart. Maybe if you had enough children you could get used to those departures, but, having only three, I never did. I felt them like amputations. Something I needed was missing. Sometimes, even now, when I come into this house and it sounds empty, before I think I will wonder, “Where are they?”
I have this love for Mattie. It was formed in me as he himself was formed. It has his shape, you might say. He fits it. He fits into it as he fits into his clothes. He will always fit into it. When he gets out of the car and I meet him and hug him, there he is, him himself, something of my own forever, and my love for him goes all around him just as it did when he was a baby and a little boy and a young man grown.
Sometimes it fills to the brim with sorrow, which signifies the joy that has been here, and the love. It is entirely a gift. There is a silence here now that is the absence of many voices.
