A Month of Summer

The hardest thing about the road not taken is that you never know where it might have led.

But ain't it always the way, Birdie, that the easiest faults to find in other people are the ones you got yourself?

The wounds we cause, while unintentional, still bleed.

I never did try to make my daddy understand why I left for the army the way I did. I just thought, because he loved me, he should let it go, and if he couldn’t, well then he didn’t love me like I thought. Young folks get love and understandin’ backward, don’t they? Love don’t come galloping across fresh pastures like a fine white horse with understandin’ riding soft and easy on its back. Understandin’ plods in like an old plow mule, breaking sod. It shades the earth with its body, and waters it with sweat. Love grows up in the furrow that’s left behind. It takes some patience. I was an impatient young man. ~Claude Fisher

There are times when you awake, and sense the coming day hovering just beyond the edge of the world. Your heartbeat quickens, anticipating the blinding brightness of it, grasping its awesome possibility. You await the first rays of dawn, feeling that God must have whispered something in your ear just before you roused from sleep. You can hear the voice, not quite the words, but you feel, you know with everything in you, that a promise has been made. The dark night of your soul is fading and dawn will soon arrive.

Most of the time when we got a tough row to plow, the Good Lord makes us fall a little short and puts another mule in the pasture. You don’t never know whether you’re the blind mule or the deaf mule, but you’re always one or the other.

I understood that feeling of regret, the sense that there was a moment when the paths divided and you chose one over the other.

Ultimately, it’s not so much what life deals you as what you choose to own that matters, a spiritually searching law clerk had once said to

I felt a sense of kinship, the bond of mothers raising children in a world that judged by appearances