Tuck Everlasting

by Natalie Babbitt

Nothing ever seems interesting when it belongs to you—only when it doesn’t.

For Mae Tuck, and her husband, and Miles and Jesse, too, had all looked exactly the same for eighty-seven years.

“Life’s got to be lived, no matter how long or short,” she said calmly. “You got to take what comes. We just go along, like everybody else, one day at a time.

Still—there’s no use trying to figure why things fall the way they do. Things just are, and fussing don’t bring changes.

It’s a wheel, Winnie. Everything’s a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way it is.”