We mark some days as fair, some as foul, because we do not see that the character of every day as identical

Mainly because people were what they were and you couldn't change them. most of the time, they couldn't change themselves, even if they were desperate to be somebody different from who they were. So, best keep your distance.

From my childhood, I remember a tiny old woman named Mary, made pale and almost translucent by time. Mary's childhood memories extended back to the confusing and violent finale of the Civil War, and she told stories of brutal murders in those days and refused to name some of the killers, as if dead men might still be prosecuted in the late 1950s.

That's not a thing any of us are granted. To go back. Wipe away what later doesn't suit us and make it the way we wish it. You just go on

When everything is immediately available and infinitely reproducible, nothing is valuable.

No looking back. Life goes one way only, and whatever opinions you hold about the past having nothing to do with anything but your own damn weakness. Nothing changes what already happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don't.

I've lived out West some... I've always liked the High Plains areas - eastern Colorado, eastern Wyoming, western Nebraska.