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She drew her knife and fork together. The images she might herself have conjured up were too fragile to be talked away in dinner-time conversation over plates and dishes on a table, too precious to be offered as a triviality. She had come to terms with what was there to come to terms with; she had managed, but could not now. She couldn’t grieve; no more than a fact it felt like that her mother was not alive.

How like the rest of our domestic tragedy it is that I have come too late.

Their sorrowing was their common ground, yet separated them. One spoke, the other hardly heard. Each turned away from useless pity. No premonition helped them now, no voice in a dream, no sudden instinct.

…the happy years of her marriage felt like selfishness. In all the rooms of the house she had come to as a bride there were memories of what had been so greedily hers - of gramophone music danced to with Everard's arms lightly about her, and the sluggish tick of the drawing room clock while they read by the fire, the high-backed sofa drawn up, the crackle of logs in the grate.

Here and in the house, all memory was regret, all thought empty of consolation. There hadn't been time to have the initials inscribed on the blue suitcase, yet how could there not have been time since time so endlessly stretched now, since the days that came, with their long, slow nights, carried with them a century's weight?

Disobedience had been a child's defiance, deception the coinage they had offered her themselves.

They knew each other well, the Captain and his wife. They had in common a certain way of life, an order of priorities and concerns.
Their shared experience of death when they were young had drawn them close and in their marriage had made precious for them the sense of family that the birth of a child allowed.

My other half Wilbur showed up to help and, as usual, fell asleep sitting up in his chair. Opal Butts went over and stuck a "Make an Offer" sign in front of him, and sad to say, we only got one offer from a widow lady from Gate City for five dollars and Opal took it. I had to pay it to get him back! Oh well, it's all for a good cause.

P.S. Here IS an interesting post office fact for you: Did you know that up until 1913, children in America could legally be sent by parcel post? Whew. I'm glad I wasn't a postmistress then!

Not as good as Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe but as soon as I finished it I was already missing everybody.

The ones that hurt the most always say the least.

That time, special time, so long ago... just an instant away in his mind...
Those memories were still there, and tonight he sat searching for them, just like always, grabbing at moon-beams. Every once in a while he would catch one and take a ride, and it was like magic. An old song played over and over in his head:

It was clear to Jasper that his time was over now, just like his old friends rusting out in the yards. He wished it could have been different; he had gotten through the only way he had known how. But he had gotten through.

That's what I'm living on now, honey, dreams, dreams of what I used to do.

Here they were, perfect strangers, in this small space, sharing what was probably the most intimate and painful moment of their lives, not knowing how to act or what to say. There were no rules of etiquette. Nobody had prepared them for this ordeal. Poor people, terrified like herself, trying to be brave, chatting on about their everyday lives, completely in shock, pretending everything was all right.

So I was standing before my books trying to choose what to read next and finally after about what seems like forever I took out The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop (second book of the series). Then it came to me that I don’t remember a thing about the characters. So here we go - rereading.

After sleeping together for so many years, they hardly had to go through the rigmarole of a rapprochement or a truce before they touched, even if they'd been at odds while they were talking. Their bodies, more prosaic than their souls, were intimate at a level deeper than their argument.

Of course their reading matter was quite different: her novels from the library, his serious books. As was fitting, it was usually Sophy who slipped away first, putting her novel opened face down on the floor - breaking its spine, he complained - and relinquishing her involvement in its otherness with a sigh that was close to sensuous.

they both read in bed at night, often for hours. This wasn't the anodyne reading their middle-class neighbours spoke of, helping you slip over a threshold into sleep, equivalent to swallowing pills, the marker progressing through the book in modest increments. Sophy and Grantham devoured their books: reading was a freedom torn out of the day's regulated fabric.

But part of the oddity of marriage, she thought, was in how unwise it was to attend too intently to the other per-son. This was the opposite to what she had naively imagined, as a girl. To the unmarried, it seemed that a couple must be intimately, perpetually exposed to each other - but actually, that wasn't bear-able. In order for love to survive, you had to close yourself off to a certain extent.

What a compromised generation theirs was, she thought. Materially they had so much, and yet they were haunted by this sensation of existing in an aftermath, after the best had passed.

They knew one another so well, all too well, and yet they were all continually surprised by the forgotten difficult twists and turns of one another's personalities, so familiar as soon as they appeared.

All the siblings felt sometimes, as the days of their holiday passed, the sheer irritation and perplexity of family coexistence: how it fretted away at the love and attachment which were nonetheless intense and enduring when they were apart.

Feeling so understood when I find a character so typical me - craving that alone time.

“Harriet stepped into her room later, closed the door behind her, and stood in the dark in the relief of her own space at last, feeling the evening's sociability drain out of her.”

Entering into that high-pitched sociability would be like breaking through a skin, all eyes would turn on her and see how she was hot and dishevelled from her walk. […] a stranger was a fearful and impregnable unknown country. Even this luggage intimidated her, with its aura of life lived according to a high, intolerant code that she would never master.

At last, curling on her side with her knees up, she descended the ceremonial staircase of her sleep, shedding a heavy cloak on the steps behind her, unpinning the dark rivers of her hair, which fell in her dream all the way down her back to the floor.

Magic in simplicity
“…electric light was too brutal, it would spoil the magic. And when the washing up was done and the beds were made up and the children were quiet upstairs, the adults sat around the table again, with the windows open because the night was so warm. Poetic moths, significant in a thin soup of lesser insects, blundered about the candle flames.”

The very weight of the book in her hands, and the thick good paper of the pages as she turned them, and the illustrations with the boys in their knickerbockers and the girls in pinafores, seemed to bring back other times - the time when she had first read this, and behind that the time when such children might have existed.

And I liked being in Katie's house.
I liked it better than my own. It felt safe in Katie's house, as if nothing bad could ever happen there. I wanted to stay there forever, surrounded by pastel ponies with fairy wings, and enchanted castles, and secrets, and Mog.

Sometimes we let friends inside. People we trust abso-lutely. Sometimes we show those people around. Sometimes we even build rooms for them. But there are places where no one goes. Attics filled with lumber. Cellars filled with boxes. Crawl spaces crammed with broken things. This is where we hide those things that we don't want other people to see. Sometimes - very often, in fact - we don't even want to remember them