In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir
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Read between August 28 - October 2, 2020
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What is history anyway? A story: The last man standing holds the pen. A sense of place: I am on this path that is hardly comprehensible. A birthright: I may be from, but I am not of that world.
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Home—can anyone define that? For some, it’s simple: Where the heart is. Cross-stitch that and hang it on a wall. For the rest of us, it’s a negation: Where I’ve never been. Perhaps it is, after all, that one place to which we can never return.
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I understood that I did not own the word no.
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No functions in a way that please don’t never has, in a way that tears and cries never will.
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We were Irish twins—he was born one year and four days later than I was.
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. The self, of course, is the main character of each of our stories—the hero, the martyr, the one whose suffering really matters and whose goodness is remarkable, whose shortcomings are both comprehensible and forgivable.
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Some children are taught they deserve and have such power, but for those of us who weren’t given the privilege of that knowledge, we go on doing the things we saw adults around us do, we subconsciously choose the lives that were modeled for us.
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undone—I knew my granny and papaw to be the kind of Christians some politicians claim to be, the kind of people any of us could want to be. But there is no faking that kind of humility. You can’t pretend to love and give and forgive like my granny did. She didn’t go around telling people how much faith she had, or how good God was to her. I heard it in her quiet prayers. I tasted it in the food she grew, canned, killed, and cooked. I felt it in the softness of her skin, which grew loose and spotted with age, unprotected and unadorned. It filled her house and spilled into the creeks and waiting ...more