My grandmother, who we called “Mudear” or “Mudeah,” a Southern contraction of “Mother dear,” used to repeat the words she learned from her auntie: “You weren’t born to live on flowerbeds of ease.” From the eighteenth-century pen of the “godfather of English hymnody” Isaac Watts, the phrase made its way to a Southern meditation of, as Gwendolyn Brooks described it, “living in the along” by facing adversity and making do. This sentence that echoed through our lives as a mantra might be a testament to toughness or a simple reckoning that your circumstances simply weren’t going to be easy.
