The Sea Keeper's Daughters

Life is a process of storms and rebuilding, of fires and regrowth, of loss and gain.

The most important skill in life is to learn the acceptance of that which you have not planned for yourself.

How can God allow such abominations to flourish unchecked in this world? The answer came in a question, Ruby. God, in reply, asked, "How can you?

She always wanted those around her to see the greatest possible versions of themselves. That passion made her a fantastic teacher.

Living, really living, wasn’t about clinging to control but about giving it away.

If you could know—if you could always know—when the lasts in life are coming, you’d handle them differently. You’d savor. You’d stop. You’d let nothing else invade the moment.

To love and be loved is the very thing our souls scream for from birth and every moment after, the urge to need and be needed as natural as breathing, as life-giving as breath.

If Satan has toeholds that allow him to claw and climb from the underworld to this one, they lie in our failure to see ourselves in others.

so many of the things we struggle with as human beings are not unique to our generation. There are lessons to be learned from those who’ve wandered these paths before us.

The thing about mistakes is, they become valuable when you learn from them. I

Perhaps denial is the mind’s way of protecting the heart from a sucker punch it can’t handle. Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe denial in the face of overwhelming evidence is a mere byproduct of stubbornness.

Blessings aren't fully realized until they are passed along.

How sad, I think now, to live an entire life blinded by the ordinary.

When we have little else, our stories still have value.

My pappy used to say, any day you don’t find a reason to laugh is like livin’ two days, neither one of them worth a whit.

Ever'body got story. Ever'body got a reason for what they do. You eat off somebody else's plate, drink a their cup, could be, you'd be the same way.

Take a breath, look around, a voice seemed to be whispering. None of this is here by accident, and neither are you.

The Federal Writers not only documented the natural wonders of the country, but the hidden lives of minorities, working women, immigrant laborers, sharecroppers, and others typically ignored by the history books. Their writings helped to inspire Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, among other classics. Sadly, much of the Federal Writers’ work was stored away as the Red Scare heated up, congressional committees held hearings to search for communist infiltrators on American soil, and World War II gripped the nation.

I wonder, in all of our family travels when times were good, in the fields of Europe and the far-flung reaches of the South Pacific, have I ever seen a place more glorious to the eye and beguiling to the senses than this one? Around us, misted valleys and high mountain vistas offer fold upon fold upon hundredfold of myriad greens. All is dressed in a splendor of cloud shadows.

You recall, I am sure, Old Juba’s stories of the fearsome blue-eyed mountain Indians with their six fingers and brown skin and wicked ways? No doubt you can still hear Juba threatening that, were we to vex her enough, those Melungeons would come and steal us away in the night. Ziltha, there are such people! The girl, Able, is a Melungeon. According to Mrs. Walker, her kind live high in the hills, but they are a reclusive, suspicious sort and do not warm to outsiders. Nor do outsiders warm to them.

I pour the pain into ink and write and write and write. The words paint pictures and I live Mr. Bass Carter’s life through lines and pen. This, I know now, is story at its highest capability. It agitates us to genuine joy and tears. Within story, we are given a new soul, another’s soul to try on like clothing, knowing we can shed it again should we choose.

I am transported to the time before the War between the States, a time that is bred into our awareness as Southerners, yet most often lauded as a day of grace and grandeur. Mr. Bass Carter causes me to wonder . . . how different is that history when seen from the fields and the lowly slave cabins?

Via our FWP leaders, we have been instructed to deliver “no ivory tower writing” but to bring “the streets, the stockyards, and the hiring halls into literature.” This admonishment bids us to accurately record our informants and to make them feel that they are critical to our mission.

I’m grateful to the Federal Writers, whose work was far-reaching, revolutionary, fascinating, and sometimes dangerous. They probed the corners of a hidden America, knowing that even when we have little else, our stories still have value.

. . . was their job to always hold tight to the past, to tell it to the young'uns.

Life at the Excelsior had been a good training for life in general.

If you could know —if you could always know —when the lasts in life are coming, you’d handle them differently. You’d savor. You’d stop. You’d let nothing else invade the moment.

She lays her tired head on my shoulder and looks through the shell with me, into the great mystery. I think again that heaven must be like this place, and I say that to Isabelle. I wonder, When she is in heaven and I am not, how far away will she be? “It’s just another journey,” she whispers. . . . I thought of my mother, of how desperately I wanted her to be here a little longer, a lot longer, forever. Sometimes it seemed that I should be able to change things, to alter the course of events, just by wanting it badly enough. But I couldn’t. Iola’s observations said as much. We, in our humanness, cannot help but foolishly desire eternity in this life.