Jenna

“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

“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

“But the longer I live, the more I come to see that love is not so easy for everyone. It can get awfully complicated. It can make us do good things but it can also make us do bad things.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Story of Arthur Truluv

“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