sunshine and a good book

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

I really loved The Glass Castle, which is why I was excited to find Half Broke Horses, a second novel by Jeannette Walls, while book shopping with Mamaw. It took me a while to get to it in my never ending stack of books needing to be read, but once I started, I couldn't put it down. The voice of Lily Casey Smith, Walls' grandmother, is strong, smart, and inspiring. The story of a profound woman whose life lessons we could all stand to benefit from.

Favorite excerpts:
...Jim once told Rosemary that she was so tough, any critter that took a bite of her would spit it out, and she just loved that. Rosemary was never afraid of coyotes or wolves, and she hated to see any animal caged, tied up, or penned in. She even thought that the chickens should be freed from the coop, that the risk of being eaten by a coyote was a price worth paying for freedom, and besides, she said, the coyotes needed food too...

...We had lived on that ranch for eleven years, and we loved the place. We knew each and every one of those 180,000 acres - the gullies and washes and mudflats, the sagebrush plateau, the boulder-strewn mountains and juniper-covered foothills - like we knew our own hearts. We'd respected the land. We knew what it could and couldn't do, and we'd never pushed it beyond its limits. We'd never squandered the water, and we'd never overgrazed the grass, unlike our neighbors. Anyone riding the fence line would see grass four inches high on our side and one inch on theirs. We had been good stewards. The buildings may have been a little rough on the eyes, but they were in good repair, solid and true. There wasn't a more honestly run ranch in all of Arizona. We'd known all along, of course, that we didn't own the place, but at the same time, we couldn't help considering it ours, and we felt dispossessed, like my dad and his pa did when the settlers started fencing in the Hondo Valley...

...Ernestine taught Rosemary that white wasn't really white, that black wasn't really black, that every color had other colors in it, that every line was made up of more than one line, that you should love the weeds as much as the flowers because everything on the planet had its own beauty and it was up to the artist to discover it, and that for the artist, there was no such thing as reality because the world was as you chose to see it...