Getting out of bed is a good way to leave your troubles behind.

I dream of land, cut only where streams glistened with birdsong wander through quiet hills burnt hard by the scrape of wind, and of a porch from which a single road leads only homeward.

My life feels like a book left out on the porch, and the wind blows the pages faster and faster, turning always toward a new chapter faster than I can stop to read it.

How is it possible for me to feel so young and so old at the same time?

Children are a burden to a mother, but not the way a heavy box is to a mule. Our children weight hard on my heart, and thinking about them growing up honest and healthy, or just living to grow up at all, makes a load in my chest that is bigger than the safe at the bank,and more valuable to me than all the gold inside it.

What a pure blessing it was to have a bath in a tub alone in a room where all you had to do was pump the water, not tote buckets. Then all you had to do was pull out the cork, not tote more buckets to the back porch--that kind of thing is easy to take lightly until you don't have it.

Mama told me to make a special point to remember the best times of my life. There are so many hard things to live through, and latching on to the good things will give you strength to endure, she says. So I must remember this day. It is beautiful and this seems like the best time to live and the best place