She wore tight corsets to give her a teeny waist - I helped her lace them up - but they had the effect of causing her to faint. Mom called it the vapors and said it was a sign of her high breeding and...
You're not supposed to laugh at your own father. Ever.
I realized that you can get so used to certain luxuries that you start to think they’re necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don’t need them after all. There was a bi...
Life there was hard and it made people hard.
God deals us all different hands. How we play 'em is up to us.
It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.
Aficionados of the weather. We’d follow a storm
You should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies. Everyone has something good about them, [Jeannette's mom] said. You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that.Oh yeah? I sa...
Most important thing in life is learning how to fall.
Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we...
I could see why Archimedes got all excited. There was nothing finer than the feeling that came rushing through you when it clicked and you suddenly understood something that had puzzled you. It made y...
She had her addictions and one of them was reading.
From the time the Joshua tree was a tiny sapling, it had been so beaten down by the whipping wind that, rather than trying to grow skyward, it had grown in the direction that the wind pushed it. It ex...
[Mom] said she didn't want her youngest daughter dressed in the thrift-store clothes the rest of us wore. Mom told us we would have to go shoplifting. Isn't that a sin? I asked Mom. Not exactly, Mom s...
Since Mom wasn't exactly the most useful person in the world, one lesson I learned at an early age was how to get things done, and this was a source of both amazement and concern for Mom, who consider...
Submitting seemed to me a lot like giving up. If God gave us the strength to bail- the gumption to try and save ourselves- isn't that what he wanted us to do?
A lady's hair is her crowning glory
One of the ways to discover our toughness and resiliency is to look back at where we come from. (from Amazon description)
I feel like I failed," I said. "Don't beat yourself up," Jim said. "She might not have turned out like you planned, but that don't mean she turned out wrong.
All seasons have something to offer