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“Christina, Alvaro, this is Andrew,” Betsy says, coming in behind him.
And so begins a long lasting friendship.
It reminds me of The House of the Seven Gables.
Book by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Moral allegories about people determined to root out wickedness in others while denying it in themselves.”
Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones.
True.
The mamey tree
I've Eaten that fruit.
People have maladies of all kinds, she says, and if they have any sense, they don’t waste time whining about them.
Okay for most maladies but there are many that have real cures.
“The most important qualities a human can possess are an iron will and a persevering spirit,”
She says she can’t believe she raised a child who traveled all over the world but has been content ever since to let the world come to her.
Perhaps she is content with what she has. What more could she want to see?
“There’s an old expression,” Mamey tells me. “‘Daughtering out.’
Maybe that expression needs to stay old and go away.
There are many ways to love and be loved.
Wisdom from Mamey. Christina's parents loved her and each other. No matter how it started.
He restored the inn to a family home, raises cows and sheep and chickens for milk and meat and wool and eggs. He plants corn and peas and potatoes in the rocky soil, rotating them yearly, and he set up a farm store on the property to sell them.
John Olson was not just a gold digger. He worked on and improved the farm. He took good care of his family.
The truth is, when I’m immersed in a book I’m less aware of the pain in my unpredictable arms and legs.
Books can take anywhere. Even away from pain.
“Two dozen, yes, Ramona?” She nods. “Okay, that’ll be fifty cents for the eggs and a penny for the bag,”
Twenty four eggs for fifty cents.
“Miss Pankhurst was just sentenced to three years in jail for her treasonous words.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmeline_Pankhurst
(How quickly, with a slight twist in perception, do people’s strengths become flaws!)
But I could not, in good conscience, let the moment pass without telling you what I think.”
Why does Gertrude think Christina needs her opinion?
And something in my nature bridles at the expectation that I must be grateful for charity I didn’t ask for. Perhaps because it tends to be accompanied by a kind of condescending judgment, a sense that the giver believes I’ve brought my condition—a condition I’m not complaining about, mind you—on myself.
My heart is shattered, and all that’s left are jagged shards.
So now you want to use those shards to hurt others. No matter how much you hurt, don't attack the wrong party.
My Ántonia.
By willa cather. Read it years ago. Sad, hard life.
To me, using a wheelchair would mean that I’ve given up, resigned myself to a small existence inside the house. I see it as a cage. Papa sees it as a throne, a way to maintain his fleeting dignity.
Different perspective.
I haul myself up the stairs as quickly as I can on my elbows, sweat dampening my neck from the effort.
Such torture.
It takes about an hour to get there, pulling myself along on my elbows, hitching my body forward. My cotton knee pads are frayed and grass stained.
The older I get, the more I believe that the greatest kindness is acceptance.
From the recesses of my brain a word floats up: synecdoche. A part that stands in for the whole. Christina’s World.
What she wants most—what she truly yearns for—is what any of us want: to be seen. And look. She is.
I'm not sure this is true.
Like the silhouetted figure in James Whistler’s Whistler’s Mother (1871) and the plain-featured farm couple in Grant Wood’s 1930 painting American Gothic,
they were on the brink of “daughtering out,” meaning that no male heirs had survived to carry on the family name.
now believe she had a syndrome called Charcot-Marie-Tooth, a hereditary disorder that damages the nerves to the arms and legs.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charcot%E2%80%93Marie%E2%80%93Tooth_disease
