“I have led a toothless life, he thought. A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on—and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.”
‘Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.
Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.
The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.’
Alone in A Crowd by Dennis Wells | Lindsay C. Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents | art by Holly Warburton | Liv Ullmann, from Changing
A heart-shaped meadow, created by a farmer as a tribute to his late wife, can be seen from the air near Wickwar, South Gloucestershire. The point of the heart points towards Wotton Hill, where his wife was born.
twenty years in the making…..
daffodills…. ‘you can just imagine the love story’… 🥺
“[after a half-hearted suicide attempt at age 13] When Daddy comes in, he carries you to bed. Is there anything you feel like you could eat, Pokey? Anything at all? All you can imagine putting in your mouth is a cold plum, one with really tight skin on the outside but gum-shocking sweetness inside. And he and your mother discuss where he might find some this late in the season. Mother says hell I don’t know. Further north, I’d guess. The next morning, you wake up in your bed and sit up. Mother says, Pete, I think she’s up. He hollers in, You ready for breakfast, Pokey. Then he comes in grinning, still in his work clothes from the night before. He’s holding a farm bushel. The plums he empties onto the bed river toward you through folds in the quilt. If you stacked them up, they’d fill the deepest bin at the Piggly Wiggly. Damned if I didn’t get the urge to drive to Arkansas last night, he says. Your mother stands behind him saying he’s pure USDA crazy. Fort Smith, Arkansas. Found a roadside stand out there with a feller selling plums. And I says, Buddy, I got a little girl sick back in Texas. She’s got a hanker for plums and ain’t nothing else gonna do. It’s when you sink your teeth into the plum that you make a promise. The skin is still warm from riding in the sun in Daddy’s truck, and the nectar runs down your chin. And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not so long as there are plums to eat and somebody-anybody-who gives enough of a damn to haul them to you. So long as you bear the least nibblet of love for any other creature in this dark world, though in love portions are never stingy. There are no smidgens or pinches, only rolling abundance. That’s how you acquire the resolution for survival that the coming years are about to demand. You don’t earn it. It’s given.”
