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A slow storied utopia: sharing mother's gifts

Taste: apple cider vinegar
Sight:
she brushes back her long blonde hair
Sound:
voices - soft, gravely, lyrical, deep; reading aloud
Touch:
being held
Smell:
petunias
Extra:
"Books do change the world from time to time." — Rebecca Solnit
"Something wonderful happens to you and you instantly look back over your life and see it as a series of fortunate events stretching off into the distance like mountain peaks. Something terrible happens and your life has always been a litany of woe. The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because life isn’t a story; it’s a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out the constellations from it to fit who and where we are." — The Faraway Nearby, p246, Rebecca Solnit
Grateful for: aging well and gracefully; Inspectors of Broad Slow Social Change; slow utopia

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