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Daddy says he needs a mountain to rest his eyes aginst.

Today I read 3 Christmas stories by Montgomery and liked them so much. Maybe I can find a Christmas collection of all those stories.

And you know what I think Mama was looking for, that very last time I saw her? I think she was still looking for some clue as to what had become of Joe, searching in the only places she could search, the little familiar nooks and crannies of the life he once had shared with them but then could share no longer.

See what I just wrote? Taking care. Taking care of Andrew, taking care of Sandy. Isn't that interesting? A person reading back through these letters might decide that my life has been largely a function of other people's lives, and that would be true too, or at least it would not be untrue.

There is the thing about a parent's death-especially the second parent's death— suddenly there is no other person standing between you and the great beyond, that dark-ness, the grave. I know I sound morbid, but it has been such an illuminating insight for me that I have to share it with you. Listen: the time is now. We are the next in line.

She has a way with words! Not an extraordinary prose - she describes everything, literally everything, doesn’t let you imagine, if there is something, she describes it.

Grief was not a state of mind, but a physical thing, a void, a deadening blanket of unbearable pain, precluding all solace.

I envy how these people are in comfort zone around one another and way too straight and honest.

A robin redbreast flew on to the windowsill and stood with head aslant, as if to eavesdrop. He had seen a robin yesterday, too, somewhere. It was the time of year for them. Christmas. Yule logs. Holly wreaths. Loneliness.

Memories. Somehow during the winter holidays contain more memories than any other day of the year. Maybe it’s a beautiful period for reflection about your year, but also a time when you want all the warmth you got during your whole life. And winter holidays are those perfect days to crave for more.

I am making a fruitcake this year.

Fannie Flagg is a master of creating small towns with iconic residents. Like Gilmore Girls type of small towns and people in it.

You can't go back in time she said Isn't that the whole point of it Marriage I mean That's why you do it Because you can't go back You can only go forward So you're making a vow you'll go forward together Stay together even though you'll change get sick get old That's the vow

It's funny, she seems like a loser, but she acts like she doesn't know or care she's a loser, which makes you wonder whether she is, in fact, a loser. And for a moment a part of you wishes you could go with her.

She sobbed quietly under the covers. The sound brought him a strange peace, as if she were doing it for both of them. And when at last she slept, he stayed awake for both of them, he could be exhausted for both of them. Beneath the greenish ceiling stars he felt exhausted, bereft, and only that. Not evil, not accused.

But in life, he discovered, parenthood was like — it was - living with a person. A new person, with strong opinions, strong tastes, arbitrary swings of emotion, all of them addressed at you. You were the passive one: the work of care was primarily to endure, to weather the endless, buffeting storms of unmediated will.

He remembers how when he was little and got scared he'd go in to Mam and Dad. They seemed so much larger in sleep, bloated out in their bed like great slumbering sea beasts, walruses or whales. You could just tuck yourself in under a fin, and it felt like the world and its monsters had disappeared.

Back when the children were still there Alison somehow never envisaged a time when they would not be. Oh, she knew it would come—but she never considered the implications, tried out the idea of an emptied house, listened for silence. They went gradually, of course, so silence came gradually, and there were returns […]. She has got used to it. You can get used to much-she has known that for a long while.

The garden swings grow moss; the sandbox is buried in dead leaves. It is all right, it is fine, everything is as it ever was, except different. Alison has faced down the passage of time, and emerged, if not triumphant, then afloat, on course.

But you love them all, and if there are six you don't spread it more thinly, somehow there's just more of it. When they're small they love you back, but of course later even if they still do it doesn't much show, and you just have to reckon with that, you can't expect demonstrations…

They want to know how to stop their babies crying at night and what to do about two-year-olds' tantrums, and sit impassive while she tells them that the important thing, the really crucial thing, is a real family life with lots of love and attention for everyone, all the time, and plenty of family rituals, birthday parties and everyone belonging, and of course lovely home-cooked meals.

I see three people for whom things had gone dramatically wrong, who probably should never have been together anyway. I see them muddling on, because no one could face up to doing otherwise. Condemned to cohabitation.

Neither frazzled nor laid out. Triumphant, on the whole. Fulfilled. Numbers matter—we were her bank statement. Quantity counts. We were the largest family on the street, in the school—in the town I daresay. She was unchallenged. And of course the little local glitch was a family matter.

But the house was just the backdrop. What went on in it was her creation, in every sense. Motherhood was her profession, and I have no idea if she fell into it or planned it from the moment she was a five-year-old with her first doll. Suffice it that that was what she did. My mother-our mother —set out to be the archetypal mother, the universal lap.

Perhaps need is the crucial element in any relationship, the necessary bonding material. Sexual need, emotional need, material need. But both parties must be needy, in one way or another, or things will run amok.

Until, in the nature of things, fission takes place—but at Allersmead that was a long way off, unthinkable even, for what now seems to Gina an eternal present. There was Allersmead, and its inhabitants, except that now and again there might come a moment of observation, of evaluation.

A family is a coherent mass, a set of people united because that is the way it is, progressing thus from day to day, year by year, and who is to question the matter? The component parts of this mass may make their individual sorties into the outer world —they may go to school, go to work, go shopping —but they always roll back into that self-contained unit.

Never my favorite child. Well, one hadn't thought that one was, and
does it matter?
Somewhere, in some deep tender unsuspected crevice, it does. [Gina]

"She once told me I was her favorite. She shouldn't have done that, should she? True or not. That wasn't good mother stuff. Good mothers don't have favorites, or at least they don't say so. Was it true?"
"Yes," says Gina.
(Pause.) "Did everyone know?"
"Yes."
(Pause.) "Did you mind?"
"Me? Not especially. I thought it a rather perverse choice, I remember."

Until, of course, they grew up a bit and looked around and saw that families come in other sizes and shapes, that not all homes have a cellar and a kitchen table that seats twelve, that other parents are different but still recognizable as parents.

Gina thinks of childhood at Allersmead. Sheltered, privileged. But sharing that universal attribute of childhood: the Allersmead world being the only one they knew, they could not conceive of an existence that was otherwise.