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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Living, now, had become not simple existence that one took for granted, but a bonus, a gift, with every day that lay ahead an experience to be savoured.
Your children never stopped being children. Even when they were thirty-eight and successful career women. You could bear anything for yourself, but seeing your children hurt was unendurable.
The past is another country, but the journey could be
made.
Carn Cottage stood high on the hill above the town, a small, square white house set in a garden surrounded by high walls. Going in through the gate in the wall and shutting it behind you was like going into a secret place where nothing could reach you—not even the wind.
Self-reliance. That was the keyword, the one thing that could pull you through any crisis fate chose to hurl at you. To be yourself. Independent. Not witless. Still able to make my own decisions and plot the course of what remains of my life.
It was good. And nothing good is ever lost. It stays part of a person, becomes part of one’s character.
“I think the nicest thing in the world is doing something constructive in a garden on a fine morning. It’s a combination of the best of everything.
“One day they will come, to paint the warmth of the sun and the colour of the wind.”
The Shell Seekers. Like an old and trusted friend, the picture’s constancy filled her with gratitude.
“Absence is the wind that blows out the little candle, but fans the embers of a fire to a great blaze.
Death, the last enemy, still seems a long way off, beyond old age and infirmity.
Better to have loved and lost, she told herself, than never to have loved at all. And know that it was true.
A ring was the accepted sign of infinity, eternity. If her own life was that carefully described pencil line, she knew all at once that the two ends were drawing close together. I have come full circle, she told herself, and wondered what had happened to all the years.
