Whenever She Thought She Could

Most People Use Twenty Verbs To Describe Everything From A Run In Their Stocking To The Explosion Of An Atomic Bomb. You Know The Ones: Was, Did, Had, Made, Went, Looked... One-size-fits-all Looks Like Crap On Anyone. Sew Yourself A Custom Made Suit. Pick A Better Verb. Challenge All Those Verbs To Really Lift Some Weight For You.

My Father Was An Engineer - He Wasn't Literary, Not A Writer Or A Journalist, But He Was One Of The World's Great Readers. Every Two Weeks, He'd Take Me To Our Local Branch Library And Pull Books Off The Shelf For Me, Stacking Them Up In My Arms - 'have You Read This? And This? And This?"

The Decor Bowled Me Over. Everywhere I Looked, There Was Something More To See. Botanical Prints, A Cross Section Of Pomegranates, A Passionflower Vine And Its Fruit. Stacks Of Thick Books On Art And Design And A Collection Of Glass Paperweights Filled The Coffee Table. It Was Enormously Beautiful, A Sensibility I'd Never Encountered Anywhere, A Relaxed Luxury. I Could Feel My Mother's Contemptuous Gaze Falling On The Cluttered Surfaces, But I Was Tired Of Three White Flowers In A Glass Vase. There Was More To Life Than That.

The Santa Anas Blew In Hot From The Desert, Shriveling The Last Of The Spring Grass Into Whiskers Of Pale Straw. Only The Oleanders Thrived, Their Delicate Poisonous Blooms, Their Dagger Green Leaves. We Could Not Sleep In The Hot Dry Nights, My Mother And I.

A Person Didn’t Need To Be Beautiful, They Just Needed To Be Loved. But I Couldn’t Help Wanting It. If That Was The Way I Could Be Loved, To Be Beautiful, I’d Take It