Undressing the Moon

Hope is really just desire disguised, just desperation, aching, dressed up like a prayer.

We pretended she'd only gotten lost in the colors of fall. Piper

We lived among people whose poverty could be seen in the length of their faces, in their tired speech and in the heaviness of their eyes.

My mother taught me how to find grace in wreckage. She taught me not how to reassemble, but how to rearrange. The stained-glass pictures she made were certain evidence that things can be broken and put back together, and that the mended thing will be more beautiful than the original.

That's the way with sentimental things: it's the memory the junk conjures that's valuable, not the junk itself.