Blush

by Jamie Brenner

Just like wine and cheese had a terroir, so did people.

That was the oddest thing about middle age: the past could sometimes feel more potent, more relevant, than the present. Life was like tossing a ball into the ocean. She thought the past was the past, but then it came riding back on a wave and lying at her feet.

I have known more than one woman living in an imaginary dream world, rather than face the reality of her own life. —Shirley Conran

the idea that you became an adult when you stopped caring about what other people thought about you and instead started caring about what you thought of them.

“Italo Calvino, in The Uses of Literature, said: ‘A classic is a book that has never finished what it has to say.’”

But when someone comes into your life and changes your understanding of yourself, that person becomes a part of you.

She’d read somewhere that a person could change everything about herself except her place of origin.