The people stared through her as though she were invisible until she thought she was, and walked more easily then, just a cloud reflected in a stream.

My grandfather was a persuasive man who made friends with people at every level of influence. In order to fight against our tribe's termination, he went to newspapers and politicians and urged them to advocate for our tribe in Washington. He also supported his family through the Depression as a truck farmer.

[She also tempers emotion with wry perspective. A woman driven to infamy by passion cannot have the man she loves.] As women have found since love began, ... she found she could live.

In our own beginnings, we are formed out of the body's interior landscape, For a short while, our mothers' bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world.

I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.

Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.