Jenna

“Families change when a parent dies, and not always how you'd expect. Sometimes they turn brittle, splintering off into dark places, like a pencil stuck too far in the sharpener. Sometimes they just get quiet. Their conversations float on the surface, never venturing into the deeper waters to reach the fears and gray questions that keep each one of them awake in the dead of night, eyes wide open in the darkness of their separate rooms lined up along the same hallway. Little things that don't matter become stand-ins for things that do. It's just easier, I suppose, to be angry over who got the gooseneck rocker when Aunt Jo died that it is to admit you're scared because you don't know why Aunt Jo had to die in the first place. She was only forty-six years old.

But you don't realize this when you're young. You just think adults don't talk about things because they're not really important, or maybe they don't think you'll understand. So you start to push the scary questions away, deep down inside yourself. It's not until you're older that it dawns on you that adults are afraid to ask the questions themselves.”
― Pamela Terry, The Sweet Taste of Muscadines

“I learned long ago that it's far better to stand alone with integrity than be surrounded by people who don’t even like who you are at your core.”
― Juliana Smith, Drawn Together

“Growing up in the South is not for the faint of heart. An enigmatic place at the best of times, it is paradoxical to the core. Finding your way through the various switchbacks and roundabouts that make up the overgrown maze of its personality can be a bewildering experience and one that often takes a lifetime, at least. Just when you think you have it solidly in your sights, it slips around a corner, leaving only the faint fragrance of a fading magnolia hanging in the muggy air. At the very moment you feel confident in its definition, it can, without warning, fashion itself into a creature of myth, sending you back to huddle over your history books and crystal balls, once again in search of the truth about this place you call home. Its a land where heart-stopping beauty and heartrending ugliness flourish in tandem, a land of kindness and hate, of ignorance and wit, of integrity, blindness, and pride.”
― Pamela Terry, The Sweet Taste of Muscadines

“Our southern accent might lie dormant when we were in other parts of the country but was known to reemerge without warning in sympathetic surroundings.”
― Pamela Terry, The Sweet Taste of Muscadines