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Kindle Notes & Highlights
she’d figure the grocery money. But hunger was a pushing thing, so she stepped onto Main and walked, head down, toward the Piggly Wiggly on
in the backseat, Kya didn’t smile and didn’t feel like a chick tucked under its mother’s wing.
Imagery. Local color. Childlike
Several girls, dressed in full skirts fluffed out wide with layers of crinolines, approached. One was tall, skinny, and blond, another round with chubby cheeks. Kya wondered how they could climb a tree or even get in a boat wearing those big skirts. Certainly couldn’t wade for frogs; wouldn’t even be able to see their own feet.
Class. A little obvious.
Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.
Overwrought. Pretty. Too blantant.
Finally, the trees parted, and she glided into a place of wide sky and reaching grasses, and the sounds of cawing birds. The view a chick gets, she reckoned, when it finally breaks its shell.
Nice image.
Shit fire an’ fall in.
Local color.
Kya watched the mother run her fingers through the curls; didn’t miss how long they held each other’s eyes. A woman came out
Class trauna.
Even the postmark was gone. Now she’d never know where Ma was. She put the ashes in a little
Sad
Kya knew that was true. Jumpin’ had no extra space, so she’d be doing him a favor to take them off his wharf.
Perspective
“It ain’t just that.” She spoke almost in a whisper. “I wadn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full.” He smiled. “That’s a very good sentence. Not all words hold that much.”
Portent
And just at that second, the wind picked up, and thousands upon thousands of yellow sycamore leaves broke from their life support and streamed across the sky. Autumn leaves don’t fall; they fly. They take their time and wander on this, their only chance to soar. Reflecting sunlight, they swirled and sailed and fluttered on the wind drafts. Tate sprang from the log and called to her, “See how many leaves you can catch before they hit the ground!” Kya jumped up, and the two of them leapt and skipped through curtains of falling leaves, reaching their arms wide, snatching them before they fell to
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Caught betweedn child and aduly.
The penis of the male damselfly is equipped with a small scoop, which removes sperm ejected by a previous opponent before he supplies his own.
Haha!
Deeper, it had more to say.
Metaphor.
“I’ve read a lot about this since. In nature—out yonder where the crawdads sing—these ruthless-seeming behaviors actually increase the mother’s number of young over her lifetime, and thus her genes for abandoning offspring in times of stress are passed on to the next generation. And on and on. It happens in humans, too. Some behaviors that seem harsh to us now ensured the survival of early man in whatever swamp he was in at the time. Without them, we wouldn’t be here. We still store those instincts in our genes, and they express themselves when certain circumstances prevail. Some parts of us
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Crawdads a metaphor for genetics. Nature. Et al.
Dominance hierarchies enhance stability in natural populations, and some less natural, Kya thought.
Man v. Nature
