Jenna

“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

“The back roads of the South are, like the South itself, a medley of disparity. The storybook sight of fat-bellied cows, like soft polka dots on lemon-lime fields, can momentarily lull the passerby into believing he is traveling through paradise.”
― Pamela Terry, The Sweet Taste of Muscadines

“It really doesn’t matter the amount of time that passes between visits to your hometown. It’s as if a sleeping sensibility awakens in the very marrow of your bones to answer a call made even more insistent by its silence. It’s a call from within, a visceral response to the way sunlight lies across a certain green field or the sight of a mockingbird all alone on a fence post.”
― Pamela Terry, The Sweet Taste of Muscadines

“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