The Bird Sisters Quotes

“Life and death- what paltry words, what tarnished bookends,what unjust summation for drawing breath one moment and failing to release it the next.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“This book I'm reading says if you want to be as thin as a stalk of celery, then that's what you should be eating. I'm not sure I want to look like celery, but I know I don't want to look like a biscuit.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“Once a bird had lost his ability to fly, not much else could be done in the way of mending him. Losing a wing was a little like losing a leg and the freedom of movement, of spirit, it granted you; most people could live without the former but not the latter.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“Bett didn't have any siblings because she said her father had preserved what was dead for too long to be able to create life. When Bet was younger and had begged for one, her father gave her a marmot he' stuffed for a man from Wyoming.
"This is your brother Christopher," he'd said, placing the marmot on Bett's pillow one night. "He doesn't talk much, so you'll have to pick up the slack there.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“After Twiss went out the barn, Milly went up to their bedroom with the brown paper bag. She looked out the window before she turned it upside down and the bars of lavender soap shaped like seashells and the card shaped like a rectangle came tumbling out. Asa's name graced the front of the card. A note graced the back.

'I know why you did it, Milly. Bella swings a golf club just like him.'

Milly sat a long time on her old twin mattress, staring at the fleur-de-lis carved into the headboard, at the life that didn't belong to her and the life that did, before she placed the soaps beneath the velvet tray in her jewelry box and closed it. She never washed her hands with a single one of the seashell-shaped soaps, although from time to time, when Twiss had gone for a walk or to the barn, she'd open her jewelry box and examine her only secret.
'La joie de vivre.' The scent of lavender. Forgiveness. Age-old love.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“Used to be when a bird flew into a window, Milly and Twiss got a visit. Milly would put a kettle on and set out whatever culinary adventure she'd gone on that day. For morning arrivals, she offered her famous vanilla drop biscuits and raspberry jam. Twiss would get the medicine bag from the hall closet and sterilize the tools she needed, depending on the seriousness of the injury. A wounded limb was one thing. A wounded crop was another.
People used to come from as far away as Reedsburg and Wilton. Milly would sit with them while Twiss patched up the 'poor old robin' or the 'sweet little meadowlark.' Over the years, the number of visitors had dwindled. Now that the grocery store sold ready-bake biscuits and jelly in all the colors of the rainbow, people didn't bother as much about birds.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“Every Saturday, heat or cold, rain or shine, Milly would see Avery running up their road, her long blond ponytail swishing in time with her legs, just as the sun was making gemstones out of the fields and the hills and the bales of hay scattered across the landscape. Twiss would still be snoring away upstairs. Years of sleep remedies had failed to subdue her; she still slept like a wild animal and woke like one, too.
On warm mornings, Milly would take her cup of tea out to the porch to watch Avery run by. Though she'd never been a runner herself- she didn't like the sensation of breathlessness, or the hard thunk of her heart- she'd loved to watch Twiss run. And Avery was an even better runner than Twiss had been, and certainly more graceful. She'd run first on the Spring Green high school team and then on the university team and now was training to run the marathon in the Olympic trials.
In an interview, when a reporter from the 'Gazette' asked her why she ran, Avery said, "Why does anybody do anything?" which had made Milly like Avery even more.
Each Saturday morning, after she passed the driveway, Avery would pick up speed in order to crest the upcoming hills. Sometimes she ran with a yellow music player and matching headphones, but most of the time, she ran without them.
"Something comes in and something goes out," Avery had added in the interview, as if she'd been playing at being coy but couldn't really play when it came to running. "I'd keep running forever if my legs would let me."
"Tell me about the routes you run in Spring Green," the reporter had said.
"My favorite is my Saturday route," Avery said. "There's this little purple meadow I pass on my way up into the hills. When I was little, my grandpa used to say it was enchanted. He said if you walked through it, you'd never be the same person again."
"Where did he hear the story?" the reporter asked.
"I guess he used to know the people who lived in that house," Avery said.
"The bird sisters?" the reporter said.
"All I know is, when I pass that meadow, suddenly I can run faster," Avery said.
"Are you superstitious?"
"I visualize the meadow during all of my races, if that's what you mean."
"Have you ever walked through it?"
"I believe in it too much," Avery said.
"Can you be more specific?" the reporter asked.
"No," Avery said.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“The town fair, which took place over the last weekend of August each year, was just over a month away. If their family agreed about anything, it was the town fair. Twiss loved the Wild West game and the spun sugar; their father loved the putting game and the caramel apples; their mother loved the bean counting game- last year she'd guessed 1,245 beans and won a forty-pound sack of kidney beans- and the Ferris wheel; and Milly loved what everyone else loved, except the livestock show and the amateur rodeo, where boys from the 4-H club wrestled calves to the ground for giant gold belt buckles.
Milly also loved how the fair transformed the abandoned field behind the high school from twenty-five dandelion-inhabited acres that went unnoticed most of the year into a kind of fairy-tale place, where people sucked on cherry-flavored ice chips and honey-roasted peanuts, and the Ferris wheel went round and round, and the firecrackers reached higher and higher.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“At the end of his visit, Mr. Peterson's doctor wrote out a complicated list of dietary recommendations for Bett, which included meat, meat, and meat, and also plenty of butter and cream. He said she was lacking animal proteins, what Bett called 'grr.' Now instead of washing and ironing all morning, their mother spent that time preparing meals- 'A carnivore's delight!' Twiss said- for Bett. She'd fry ground beef, bake it, or boil it until it was hard and gray.
"Look!" Twiss said on boiled meat days. "A brain!”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“My art teacher says I have talent," Twiss told her father, thinking of her last piece. Although she usually preferred to draw things like bloody axes and pus balls, for the last project of the quarter her teacher had asked them to draw a picture of what happiness felt like. Twiss drew a flock of all different kinds of birds- red, blue, gray, green- taking flight from the top branches of an old-growth pine tree. When her teacher asked her to explain the drawing, Twiss said to her happiness felt like freedom. Sadness felt like the opposite.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“According to her chore list, she was supposed to feed the chickens. Milly hd already retrieved the eggs. She'd mentioned something about egg salad, if she could round up a jar of pickles in the cellar.
"A change might do us good," she'd said, which made Twiss laugh.
"Nothing like old pickles to oust us from routine."
Twiss fed the chickens, each of whom she called Raoul because she couldn't tell them apart, and swept up the droppings on the floor.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“As much as Milly loved seeing Asa on that tractor, a part of her dreaded the days he came to mow, not only because her father made her go out to him with cookies and lemonade and watched her closely the entire time, but also because on those nights, Bett and Twiss would trick her into talking about Asa, and Milly would fall for their tricks. Milly understood Twiss's reasons for teasing her- Twiss didn't want to lose her- but she never understood Bett's.
Bett would start innocently enough. "I heard Milly was talking to someone in the meadow the other day. I heard she baked him a red velvet cake shaped like a heart."
"I heard she did more than that," Twiss would say.
"With Mr. Peterson."
"She likes them old, yep, she does."
"Wrinkly," Bett would say.
"Hairy."
"Pruney!"
When Milly could no longer stand the teasing, she'd pull her blanket over her head and say, "It wasn't Mr. Peterson I was talking to, it was Asa! And it wasn't red velvet cake, it was butter cookies! They weren't shaped like hearts, either!"
And then the laughter would come, and Milly would know she'd been fooled into giving up another part of herself that she preferred to keep secret. The night she first told them about how much she admired Asa's work ethic (when she really just meant him), Bett and Twiss had made fun of her, and of Asa's slight stutter.
"M-M-May I eat one of your cookies?"
"Y-Y-Yes, you may."
"M-M-May I love you like coconut flakes?"
"L-L-Love me like coconut flakes, you may."
They laughed when they said the word "love," but that was the word Milly had begun to think about- the possibility of it- whenever she was with Asa and, even more often, when she was without him. The word was with her when she pinned clothes to the line, or scrubbed the linoleum, or baked a pie. Sometimes, when no one was looking, she'd trace an A into a well of flour or hold a mop as though she were holding Asa's hand.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“Milly went to work on her piecrust. After she'd rolled out the bottom layer and then the top one, she moved on to the kidney beans. She didn't know that the beans had to be soaked in warm water overnight and then cooked for several hours otherwise they'd upset the digestive tract- 'to the point of tears,' Milly would read later in the cookbook. She plucked a sprig of thyme from her herb box on the windowsill and dropped it, along with the beans, into the pie.
'Poor things,' she said to her herbs, stroking their leaves, which were soft as feathers.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“While their mother told Mrs. Bettle and Bett about her trip to France when she was a girl- 'Oh, Champs-Elysées!'- Milly hauled out a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and a sack of dried kidney beans from the pantry. She opened her recipe book, looking for something to make out of the available ingredients: milk, flour, butter, and kidney beans. When she didn't find a recipe, she decided to do what every woman in the country did when she lacked materials: bake a pie. Not every woman would have made a kidney bean pie, though.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“The idea of Milly drowning in the riverside made Twiss think of an angel falling from the sky; Milly had two pink birthmarks the size of dimes on her back, which always made Twiss think of wings.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“Wisconsin,'" Twiss said. "That's my word."
"The word or the state?" Milly said.
"Both," Twiss said.
Twiss knew every dip and rise on their land, every anthill and every snake hole. She knew what kind of grass grew where. You could blindfold her and she'd be able to tell you what kind of bark belonged to what kind of tree. Pines were her favorite; she liked how they looked so different from the other trees n the woods, yet relied on the same underground springs to stay alive. Instead of a cotton-filled pillow like the rest of the family slept on, Twiss slept on a pillow stuffed with pine needles. She envied the birds that lived in the actual trees.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“What would your word be?" Twiss said.
Something to do with baking. Whenever Milly could scrape together enough flour, sugar, and butter, she'd bake a dessert. Often, her parents would stop what they were doing and wander into the kitchen, where Twiss would already be sitting with a napkin tucked into the collar of her shirt. Something about sugar made their family sweeter.
"'Sugar,'" Milly said to Twiss, measuring out two cups' worth.
She mixed the batter and poured it into a cake pan. After she put the pan in the oven, she gave Twiss the bowl to lick and took the spoon for herself.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“She could see that like most people in the world, her mother just wanted to be loved.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“As much as Twiss craved adventures in other places, she didn’t want those places to change how she felt about home.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“What she didn’t understand when she was fourteen, but understood very well now, was that not everyone in the world could be saved or, for that matter, wanted to be.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“When her teacher asked her to explain the drawing, Twiss said to her happiness felt like freedom. Sadness felt like the opposite.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“What they didn’t understand then was that love, or even the play at love, wasn’t the same thing as forgiveness, which was what neither of their parents could offer.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“Twiss had spent her life saving birds; all she had to do was glance at one to know if it would recover or not.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters