Quotes

I can tell that slowly, slowly things are getting better inside my brain. Alexander is a year and a half and my mind is clearing up (even though he's still not sleeping through the night). I can tell because we're reading By the Shores of Silver Lake right now and I don't have a bookmark in place, but I can tell you that we're on chapter 9, "Horse Thieves," and also I remembered the page numbers for a couple of passages that I wanted to make note of from days ago (the first from chapter five and the second from chapter seven and we're only reading a chapter per day, so that means I've remembered random page numbers for days in a row).

The first quote is this:

"One little jolt is nothing at all. They had hardly noticed two miles and a half of little jolts when they rode to town from Plum Creek. But all the little jolts from sunrise to noon, and then all the little jolts from noon to sunset, are tiring" (p. 39).

This quote is very much my mood lately. I feel like I've been putting up with a lot of jolts lately and while I largely try to be a brush-it-off person, I feel somewhat tired from all the brushing and jolting. Life has thrown a lot at us the past couple of years and...I'm exhausted.

But, like, obviously it's getting better because I can remember page numbers again (certainly a litmus test for sanity).

The second passage is a short exchange between Mary and Laura. Laura is breathlessly describing the seemingly infinite nature of the prairie and how the road just ends beyond the hill and there's nothing more to see; Mary counters that the road can't possibly end since it leads all the way to their destination, which Laura admits she agrees with. Then Mary chastises her:

"Well, then I don't think you ought to say things like that," Mary told her gently. "We should always be careful to say exactly what we mean." 

"I was saying what I meant," Laura protested. But she could not explain. There were so many ways of seeing things and so many ways of saying them (p. 58).

In the light of the writing class I recently finished, I loved that line about there being so many ways of seeing things and so many ways of saying them. Very often when people complain about my writing, that's the issue they bring up: "that's not the way it happened!" or "I don't remember it that way!"

And that's the beauty of life, the beauty of being an individual. We all see things differently, we all recall different details, we all interpret situations through the scope of our own experience. And that's why there will always be an infinite number of stories to tell in an infinite number of ways.

And that's a beautiful thing.