The unmulched garden looks to me like some naked thing which for one reason or another would be better off with a few clothes on.

To the Memory of those faithful brown slave-men of the plantations throughout the South, Daddy's contemporaries all, who during the war while their masters were away fighting in a cause opposed to their emancipation, brought their blankets and slept outside their mistresses' doors, thus keeping night-watch over otherwise unprotected women and children -- a faithful guardianship of which the annals of those troublous times record no instance of betrayal.

The central paradox and challenge of marriage is that we have to make family out of someone we're not related to.

Farmers are philosophical; they have learned that it is less wearing to shrug than to beat their breasts. But there is another angle to their attitude. Things happen rapidly in the country; something new always comes along to divert them and it isn't necessarily another calamity.

Only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.

I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet in a garden.

Farmers are philosophical. They have learned that it is less wearing to shrug than to beat their breasts.