They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.

What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.

That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.

The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

I would ... go up to the mailbox and sit in the grass, waiting. ... Till it came to me one day there were women doing this with their lives, all over. There were women just waiting and waiting by mailboxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my hair starting to go gray, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that. ... If there were woman all through life waiting, and women busy and not waiting, I knew which I had to be.

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.

There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.