Anything Is Possible (Amgash #2)

by Elizabeth Strout

This was the skin that protected you from the world—this loving of another person you shared your life with.

The bewilderment of how much he loved her—yet that was more knowledge now than feeling—when

Finally she said, “Everything’s always amazed you, Mom.”

She came to understand that people had to decide, really, how they were going to live.

But it turned out she could not stay away from the woods on days when the sun was bright. The physical world with its dappled light was her earliest friend, and it waited with its open-armed beauty to accept her sense of excitement that nothing else could bring.

She had recently, though, had fantasies of what they called “going normal.” Having a house and a husband and children and a garden. The quietness of all that. But what would she do with all the feelings that streamed down her like small rivers? It was not the sound of applause Annie liked—in fact, she often barely heard it—it was the moment onstage when she knew she had left the world and fully joined another. Not unlike the feelings of ecstasy she’d had in the woods as a child.