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The truth is that Olive did not understand why age had brought with it a kind of hard-heartedness toward her husband.
blue. She could not understand what it was about her, but it was about her that had caused this to happen.
The house where she had raised her son—never, ever realizing that she herself had been raising a motherless child, now a long, long way from home.
His wife looked like a melted candle,
now. Because in February the days were really getting longer and you could see it, if you really looked. You could see how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees,
“You know, Cindy, if you should be dying, if you do die, the truth is—we’re all just a few steps behind you. Twenty minutes behind you, and that’s the truth.”
“But it’s never starting over, Cindy, it’s just continuing on.”
And so the day they had had together folded over on itself, was done with, gone.
What frightened him was how much of his life he had lived without knowing who he was or what he was doing.
Helen looked up at Margaret and said, “I’m talking about my grandchildren too much.” Margaret said, “Yes. You are.” Helen felt a sense of disbelief,
And it came to him then that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect:
through the glass at the dark field.
there was an extra layer of beauty to her face.
she had the sense that she was a huge chunk of smelly cheese
her. It seemed to her to be one of the few times in her life when she didn’t say what she thought.
You look like a butterfly, come on in.”
“over the bridge,” as Edith said it was called, the place across an actual little bridge where people went when they had strokes and things,
Olive thought about this: the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when—as in her own case—it was temporary.
But Betty had kept this love close to her heart for years and years; she had needed it that much.
Then, as the van wound its way up the street and around the corner—Olive could not believe this—they all started to sing. “The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round….”
“She’s going through a stage.” “Aren’t we all,” Olive said.
and he would get on his mower and he just mowed those fields. Mowed and mowed and mowed. And then he met Isabelle. “Did he stop mowing?” Olive asked. Isabelle said, “He didn’t mow as much.”
sardine fishing net, all sorts of useless seaweed and broken bits of shells and the tiny, shining fish—all those hundreds of students she had taught, the girls and boys in high school she
