Call Your Daughter Home

by Deb Spera

It’s easier to kill a man than a gator, but it takes the same kind of wait. You got to watch for the weakness, and take your shot to the back of the head.

One of the best opening lines, EVER.

Alcohol made my husband feel bigger, but he couldn’t see that all it did was make him jagged.

“If we don’t celebrate the small movements forward, we forget they existed at all.”

“Late starts in life have no less relevance than early ones. In fact, I would argue they have more relevance. Experience in life can only be judged by the obstacles one has to overcome to get it.”

“You got to have faith, O. There’s things we can’t see. We can only see what’s in front of us, what our eyes make out. We don’t have God’s view.

Sometimes the years go by so fast it’s like flipping pages in a book, but a day can take so long a whole life’s gone by before the sun sets down.

“Can’t always stand to the side, Oretta. Sometimes you got to try to change what you don’t like.”

Getting a man to talk about what troubles him is like digging in winter soil.

no matter how much we look at what happened, no matter how many times we think back to what might have been if we could’ve done one thing different, no matter what, we always come up the same. We live over and over in the happening only to be left with what’s already done.

There is a time and place for memories, and old age is where they often come to reside. I used to gather them one after another, thinking, I won’t forget, I won’t forget. But it is the details that leave first and in their wake is only the one big moment. Maybe it’s a year or five years, maybe a day, some terrible day, but beyond that all the details fade. What’s left is a wave so big it smothers. Children are such a wave, the birthing and caring and rearing. When you’re in the throes it all seems interminable. Then, whoosh, it’s over. I don’t know why I was surprised when the children grew up, but I was. I thought, in their youth, it would last forever. Now I see that it was my youth, not theirs that was speaking. The past is now and now and now.

Polite make-believe is weary business, and there is no one better at this than Southerners.

This is sad, but SO. TRUE.

Men can’t bear what women must. They jump to cry insanity as cause for a woman’s unhappiness; the utterance of the unutterable must be dementia. It’s just too much to consider otherwise.