People just showed up and were always made welcome. To stay less than an hour was an insult, and there was always a meal. - Shirley Abbott

Within our family there was no such thing as a person who did not matter. Second cousins thrice removed mattered.

The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes—to me a beatitude—is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women—or men—can suffer is to be bereft of their past.

We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.