What Aunt Tess loved to say was: Sugar, it’s no parade but you’ll get down the street one way or another, so you’d just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up your pace.
We’re genetically predisposed toward certain behaviors that we’ve collectively decided are unhelpful; adultery and racism are possible examples. With reasonable success, we mitigate those impulses thr...
We’d worked so hard for God’s favor, yet it seemed God was still waiting for some extra labor on our part, and it was up to my father to figure out what.
Well, yeah, Dovey said. That's America. We watch shows about rich people's houses and their designer dresses and we drool. It's patriotic.
Well, my stars, the thing was like the Bible—look hard enough in its pages, and you’ll find what you seek. Love your neighbor, or slay him with the jawbone of an ass.
Well, Hallelujah and pass the ammunition. Company for dinner! And and eligible bachelor at that, without three wives or even one as far as I know. Anatole, the schoolteacher, is twenty=four eyars of a...
We're a nation with an eating disorder, and we know it. The multiple maladies caused by bad eating are taking a dire toll on our health--most tragically for our kids, who are predicted to be this coun...
We would not wake up from this nightmare to find out it was someone's real life, and for once that someone wasn't just a poor unlucky nobody in a shack you could forget about. It was our life, the onl...
We probably started painting our nails Immoral Coral after everybody sensible had already gone on to pink, but heck, at least we were all behind the times together.
We only knew, somewhat abstractly, we were going to spend a year integrating our food choices with our family values, which include both love your neighbor and try not to wreck every blooming thing on...
We may not like thinking about it, but germs crawl eternally over every speck of our planet. Our own bodies are bacterial condos, with established relationships between the upstairs and downstairs nei...
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work--that goes on, and it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children's bellies and their bright...
Wake up now, look alive, for here is a day off work just to praise Creation: the turkey, the squash, and the corn, these things that ate and drank sunshine, grass, mud, and rain, and then in the short...
Two dots an inch apart, as small and tidy as punctuation marks at the end of a sentence none of us could read. The sentence would have started somewhere just above her heart.
Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so dri...
To think is not always to see.
This I need to be told? she’d snapped. As if, sitting in this kitchen where she felt the disapproving presence of his dead mother, she could forget where he’d grown up. Cole was the youngest of six ch...
They count that as your birthday -- the day your mother gets up.Not the day you were born?Not the day you came out. They count the mother getting better as all part of the birth.
They all attended Hester's church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.
There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes....