my mother always found me out. Always. She's been dead for thirty-five years, but I have this feeling that even now she's watching.

Life's got to be lived, no matter how long or short. You got to take what comes.

Still-there's no use trying to figure why things fall the way they do. Things just are, and fussing don't bring changes.

Time is like a wheel. Turning and turning - never stopping. And the woods are the center; the hub of the wheel. It began the first week of summer, a strange and breathless time when accident, or fate, bring lives together. When people are led to do things, they've never done before. On this summersday, not so very long ago, the wheel set lives in motion in mysterious ways.

For some, time passes slowly. An hour can seem like an eternity. For others, there was never enough. For Jesse Tuck, it didn't exist.

I have a wonderful husband, and we have had a great life.

Living's heavy work, but off to one side the way we are, it's useless, too. It don't make sense. If I knowed how to climb back on the wheel, I'd do it in a minute. You can't have living without dying. So you can't call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.