I think this book really spoke to me because growing up I never lived in a place longer than 4 years and that pattern has continued throughout my adult life. I have yearned to be physically close to best friends and feel I am part of a community. Hence the many excerpts. My apologies-
I highly recommend this book.
"Ruthie said, 'What are you doing with my number?' I didn't know what she was talking about," says Mike. "She said, 'That's mine.' I said no, I just took it out of my backpack. She took off running to the back of the house, and came back with hers. They were exactly alike, with the number 709."
She thought these kinds of things were like God winking at us, letting us know that there is a hidden order running deeply beneath the surface of the world. Loc 1081 page 74
Did I have the right to risk my life for the sake of a story? How could I leave my wife a widow and my son fatherless because I found the danger exciting and wanted to write a better column for the next day's paper? Loc 1209 page 83
Why do we turn away from the opportunities for grace and mercy, and withhold them from others, who need them as much as we do?...we fallible creatures sometimes need to see something amazing to make us grasp that life is a miracle, and that hope and redemption are in all things, every day of our lives, if only we could be humble enough to accept them. Loc1840 page 126
I thought once again about how little I really knew about Ruthie's life, and how I understood even less. I had somehow come to think of her living in a small town as equivalent to her living a small life. Loc 2840 page 194
Like Ruthie, my mother and father had cultivated it, in this little patch of ground, all their lives. They had no grand gestures of philanthropy or goodness to their name, but rather they always faithful in small things....He did it because he was their neighbor. You live in one place long enough, and live that way, the interest in your good deeds add up.
I did not live that way. I never stayed in one place long enough to develop that kind of relationship with my community....It was so easy, though, to live inside one's bubble, and not see your neighbors in the way West Feliciana people saw their neighbors. Bowling alone, so to speak, was the way so many in my circles rolled. Loc 2996 page 205
...if you haven't lived in a place for years and come to make its stories part of yourself. Absence has consequences. Loc 3052 page 208
Accept the limitations of a place, in humility, and the joys that can also be found there may open themselves. Loc 3295 page 225
This is what it meant to move home. Communication romanticism is fine, but what do you do when the past isn't even past, but is in fact jogging down your street, and stepping onto your front porch to say hello? Loc 3369 page 230
You can't unsee what you have seen, unlearn what you have learned. The only way to live entirely at ease with one's hometown is never to have left, never to have seen how else life is elsewhere, right? Or maybe not. Ruthie's nature was not my nature. For me the only reason I was able to return to St. Francisville in the middle of my life was because I left it so long ago and satisfied my curiosity about the world beyond. Had I chosen Ruthie's path when I was young, my way through life would likely have been bitter, filled with regret about roads not taken. Loc 3532 page 242
...trying to recapture the shock and awe that captivated my imagination at seventeen. It would not come. You can meet your true love for the first time only once. Loc 3551 page 243
...I grieve for how cracked and broken we all are. Love is the only thing that can fill the cracks and make us whole and strong again. Loc 3555 page 243
It's always better to live in the truth, as hard as it is, than to live a happy lie. Loc 3592 page 245
Doing good things instead of thinking good thoughts - that was new to me, and it felt right. Loc. 3757 page 256
For myself I had seen the errors one can fall into by placing too much emphasis on career and individual desire at the expense of family and place. But what Paw had done, in part, was to reveal the catastrophic mistake one can make if one makes a false god of family and place.
There has to be balance. Not everyone is meant to stay - or to stay away - forever. There are seasons in the lives of persons and of families. Our responsibilities, both to ourselves and to each other, is to seek harmony within the limits of what we are given - and to give each other grace. Loc 3838 page 262
