Sometimes you read things that crack bad days apart and blow away the pieces. I did today.
From Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson
Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees and rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prism, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water-- peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing-- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is to all but feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries
I know, I could do without all the "for"s too, but seriously, doesn't that make you want to call someone you love and read it out loud?
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