This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone

Later when I thought of the chickens, one of those rare pale blue eggs rose up into my throat. The chickens had been part of our family, and the egg in my throat was the feeling of something missing. It was hard and smooth and heavy, but also so fragile it might break and make me cry. It was the feeling of growing out of a favorite shirt, milk spilled on the floor, the last bit of honey in the jar, falling apple blossoms. It was the lump in the throat behind everything beautiful in life.

Fall arrived with its honey light and cool evenings, and the maple leaves brightened to match the reds and yellow of ripe apples. It was time to put away the bounty of the warm months for fortitude during the cold ones, as humans had done for centuries.

God was something I did not understand the way kids who went to church did. They said God was a man in the sky with white hair and a beard like Santa. This seemed strange to me. When I thought of God, I imagined only mist over the pond, a sliver of moon in a dark sky, scatterings of stars, birdsong.

Choose your enemies carefully [...] for you will become more like them than anyone else.

To succeed at this life, they had to constantly feed their vision of it, or it would wither and die

The reality of this way of life is that you have got to keep at it even when you don't feel like it[...] Otherwise you won't make it. It's no life for dabblers. You've got to dig it wholeheartedly, for if you don't, you just simply won't be happy nor successful at what you do.

Books,' Papa often said, 'are the truest friends.

Work as well as you can and be kind[.]