While Molly and Joseph Anning suffered materially that winter, with many days of weak soup and weaker fires, Mary barely noticed how little she was eating or the chilblains on her hands and feet. She...
We had not meant our choice to cut us off from our past, but it did. We had only the present and the future to think of in Lyme.
The second he was gone the women began chattering like chickens at the sight of a fox.
Stay here and do the packing and let the young one run all over California for you! Don't you always say the success of collecting is in the packing? You're the boss--take the most important role and...
My mommy told meIf I was goodyThat she would buy meA rubber dollyMy sister told herI kissed a soldierNow she won't buy meThat rubber dollyNow I am deadAnd in my grave
Life itself was far messier and didn’t end so tidily with the heroine making the right match.
I slowed my pace. Years of hauling water, wringing out clothes, scrubbing floors, emptying chamber pots, with no chance of beauty or color or light in my life, stretched before me like a landscape of...
I liked sleeping in the attic. There was no Crucifixion scene hanging at the foot of the bed to trouble me. There were no paintings at all, but the clean scent of linseed oil and the musk of the earth...
I leaned agains the warm brick wall and gazed up. It was a bright, cloudless day, the sky a mocking blue. It was the kind of day when children ran up and down the streets and shouted, when couples wal...
I have always admired most those who lead with their eyes, like Mary Anning, for they seem more aware of the world and its workings.
I have a bed and enough to eat and kind people about me. God is still with me. For these things I am grateful and have no reason to complain
I had always thought of the sea as a boundary keeping me in my place on land. Now, though, it became an opening.
I did not mind the cold so much when he was there.
His parting would have been solemn but we were too busy to think much of it. We were weaving fourteen hours a day then, with hardly a moment for meals, and I was dizzy with the pattern of the tapestry...
Yalnızca hırsızlar ve çocuklar koşar.
We say very little, for we do not need to. We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back.
Twenty-first-century attitudes towards time and our expectations of story are very different from the shape of Mary Anning’s life. She spent day after day, year after year, doing the same thing on the...
This was the sort of situation that she read about in the novels she favored, by authors such as Miss Jane Austen, whom Margaret was sure she’d met long ago at the Assembly Rooms the first time we vis...
There followed a time when everything was dull. The things that had meant something lost importance, though they were still there, like bruises on the body that fade to hard lumps under the skin.
Prying out a stump reminded him of how deeply a tree clung to the ground, how tenacious a hold it had on a place. Though he was not a sentimental man - he did not cry when his children died, he simply...