Naomi’s Reviews > Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream > Status Update

Ch.1”She was referring to her father's first wife, who had tried to poison her mother up in Nice. But how could she have known anything about that? She was an infant then.”

⭐️Ch.1”’That's funny. Tying up all the stories. Why somebody want to do that?’ ‘When you write a book there has to be a story or idea, a theme ..’ ‘Well, theme I don't know nothing about. That's somebody else's rule. You just do the best way you know how. What you know from me.’ Back to the facts. I drove on in silence.”

Ch.1 “‘…Your stories go all over the place. I can't write them like that. It's too hard for people to follow. I don't know where to start.’”

Ch.1”This small Indian woman, over eighty years old, with coifed black hair and modish glasses, this little Indian woman in a mauve-colored summer dress adorned on the shoulder with a corsage of imitation African violets, had turned a Stanford auditorium up-side down. No one cracked her.”

Ch.1 “‘What do you do for poison oak?’ ‘Calamine lotion,’ Mabel answered. She was matter of fact. The student sank into her chair.”

“My lavender, which feeds so many bees, looked dry; the mimosa tree that draws the hummingbirds, wilted. Mabel came then, clear as a bell. I heard her talking about her Dream. And more: ‘You got water in your well, don’t you? . . . Well then, water the lavender, water the mimosa.’”

Preface: “It has now been eighteen years since the first publication of this book. So much has happened. ‘The world, it happens,’ as Mabel would say.”

Preface: “…’the woman who loved a snake’?—not only challenge the confines of our thinking, but help us to understand ourselves as thinking, cultured beings in a world we share with other people and all forms of life. Consequently, we can begin to think of ourselves anew in place and time. We can open ourselves and, when necessary, change, heal, or as the old saying goes, find ourselves.”

Preface: “…Renaissance literature, asked Mabel
what the snake symbolized. ‘I don’t know nothing about symbols,’ Mabel answered.” Love how blunt she is and how she doesn’t entertain questions she doesn’t care about. Or leaves stories open to interpretation so that you can form your own ideas around them. But not when it comes to important things like calamine lotion for poison ivy.