For Such A Talk As This

“I Stand Here Ironing,” by Tillie Olson is a heart wrenching story of what life is like for folks trying to raise their children without the benefit of home schooling, without the benefit of our Lord.

I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron. “I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter. I’m sure you can help me understand her. She’s a youngster who needs help and whom I’m deeply interested in helping.”

This mom has no dreams left for her daughter.

Who needs help,……Even if I came, what good would it it do? You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me.

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again. Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped.

Haven’t we all felt the same way?

The problem is public school, adolescence–they all conspiredd to draw this mom’s daughter away from her. “Now suddenly she [her daughter] was Somebody, and as imprisoned=2 0in her difference as she had been in anonymity.”

Imprisoned in her difference as she had been in anonymity.

Finally her mom cries,

I will never total it all. I will never come to say: She was a child seldom smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old. I had to work her first six years when there was work, or I sent her home and to his relatives. There were tears she had care she hated. She was dark and thin and foreign-looking in a world where the prestige went to blondness and curly hair and dimples, she was slow where glibness was prized. She was a child of anxious, not proud, love. We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother, I was a distracted mother. There were other children pushing up, demanding. Her younger sister seemed all that she was not. There were years she did not want me to touch her. She kept too much in herself, her life was such she had to keep too much in herself. My wisdom came too late. She has much to her and probably little will come of it. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear.

Perhaps that is what we home school parents are doing–we aree snatching our children from their “age” and offering them another “age” another “world..”

Once upon a time Karen and I raised four home schooled children. God knows that we could have been20better teachers, probably better parents. But one thing is for sure: we loved our children and in our home they found a safe place to grow up.

Walter Wanegerin argues that the most important present we can give our children is a “name.” We name our children as we raise them. Karen and I hope that we named our children “good,” “pleasant,” “precious,” and “beloved.” What names are you giving your children?

Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom - but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know - help make it so there is cause for her to know - that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.

We are not helpless! We serve an awesome powerful God who loves us more than we can love ourselves. At baptism he gave us a name and said it was good.

When you are ironing at the ironing board . . . think about that.

“A Wagner Matinee,” by Willa Cather is a powerful but heart wrenching message about loss and gain.

The protagonist, an aunt of the narrator Clark, has come home to Boston to attend a funeral. She has lived most of her life in the Great Plains of Nebraska.

When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard followed her, and the upshot of this inexplicable infatuation was that she eloped with him, eluding the reproaches of her family and the criticisms of her friends by going with him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who, of course, had no money, had taken a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty miles from the railroad. There they had measured off their quarter section themselves by driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel of which they had tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting off its revolutions. They built a dugout in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings whose inmates so often reverted to primitive conditions. Their water they got from the lagoons where the buffalo drank, and their slender stock of provisions was always at the mercy of bands of roving Indians. For thirty years my aunt had not been further than fifty miles from the homestead.

She loved Howard, she still loves Howard. But she had to give up so much! An accomplished pianist, she had not been to an Opera or Concert in three decades.

But this kind old lady, who did not play in Philadelphia or Boston or New York, played for Clark, the narrator, and changed his life.

I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way in my boyhood, and had a reverential affection for her. During the years when I was riding herd for my uncle, my aunt, after cooking the three meals–the first of which was ready at six o’clock in the morning-and putting the six children to bed, would often stand until midnight at her ironing board, with me at the kitchen table beside her, hearing me recite Latin declensions and conjugations, gently shaking me when my drowsy head sank down over a page of irregular verbs. It was to her, at her ironing or mending, that I read my first Shakespeare’, and her old textbook on mythology was the first that ever came into my empty hands. She taught me my scales and exercises, too–on the little parlor organ, which her husband had bought her after fifteen years, during which she had not so much as seen any instrument, but an accordion that belonged to one of the Norwegian farmhands. She would sit beside me by the hour, darning and counting while I struggled with the “Joyous Farmer,” but she seldom talked to me about music, and I understood why. She was a pious woman; she had the consolations of religion and, to her at least, her martyrdom was not wholly sordid.

It was not easy, for sure. His old aunt struggled.

Once when I had been doggedly beating out some easy passages from an old score of Euryanthe I had found among her music books, she came up to me and, putting her hands over my eyes, gently drew my head back upon her shoulder, saying tremulously, “Don’t love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you. Oh, dear boy, pray that whatever your sacrifice may be, it be not that.”

Home school, parents, what have you given up to do what you do? Has it been worth it? I think so.

Clark takes his aunt to a Wagner afternoon opera. It was wonderful! But it was not real. What was real was Nebraska and Howard.

I understood. For her, just outside the door of the concert hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, with weather-curled boards; naked as a tower, the crook-backed ash seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry; the gaunt, molting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.

Does home schooling feel that way? Oh it is exciting enough at the state conventions and on Monday morning. But what about Friday morning when no one has his essay written and Tuesday night when you discover that your daughter forgot to make supper and Thursday noon when you find you misplaced the CD story you had planned for lunch?

That is when in Nebraska you need a Wagnerian Opera to remind you of where you have come and where you are going

“Self In 1958,” was written by lonely, unhappy, unfulfilled Anne Sexton but it could be written for 2009.

What is reality?
I am a plaster doll; I pose
With eyes that cut open without landfall or nightfall
Upon some shellacked and grinning person,
Eyes that open, blue, steel, and close.
Am I approximately an I. Magnum transplant?
I have hair, black angel,
Black-angel-stuffing to comb,
Nylon legs, luminous arms
And some advertised clothes.
I live in a doll’s house
With four chairs,
A counterfeit table, a flat roof
And a big front door.
Many have come to such a small crossroad.
There is an iron bed,
(Life enlarges, life takes aim)
A cardboard floor,
Windows that flash open on someone’s city,
And little more.
Someone plays with me,
Plants me in the all-electric kitchen,

Is this what Mrs. Rombauer said?

Someone pretends with me

I am walled in solid by their noise…
Or puts me upon their straight bed.
They think I am me!
Their warmth? Their warmth is not a friend!
They pry my mouth for their cups of gin
And their stale bread.
What is reality
To this synthetic doll
Who should smile, who should shift gears,
Should spring the doors open in a wholesome disorder,
And have no evidence of ruin or fears?
But I would cry,
Rooted into the wall that
Was once my mother,
If I could remember how
And if I had the tears.

What is reality?

To many in this generation that remains an unanswered question.

What is reality?
I pose as a plaster doll,
With eyes and nothing to look at,
Seeing shellacked and grinning person,

Eyes that open and close, colors blue and steel
I am the size of an I?
I have black angel hair,
Nylon legs, luminous arms
And some advertised clothes.
I live in a doll’’s house
With four chairs,
A counterfeit table, a flat roof
And a big front door.
Some come to a small crossroad.
There is an iron bed,
(Life enlarges, life takes aim)
A cardboard floor,
Windows that flash open at the neighbors
And little more.
Someone plays with me,
Plants me in the all-electric kitchen,
It this what Mrs. Rombauer said?
Someone pretends with me
I am use to there noises
Or lays me on there bed.
I think I am a doll.
Warmth is not a friend to me!
They open my mouth for their cups to fit
And their stale bread.

What is reality

To this synthetic doll

The Associated Press calls this new generation “The Entitlement Generation,” and they are storming into schools, colleges, and businesses all over the country. They are today’s young people, a new generation with sky-high expectations and a need for constant praise and fulfillment. This new generation may be tolerant, confident, open-minded, and ambitious but it is also cynical, depressed, lonely, and anxious.

Generation Me disregards rules. 88% of public high school students regularly cheat. We are all equals of course. No one is in charge. They are an army of one: me. We will all be famous. We are entitled to it. 80% of Generation Me have sex before they leave high school.

The sad thing is, though, that Dr. Twenge found that Generation Me is more unhappy than any other generation.

Should I smile, should I shift gears,
Should I open the doors in a wholesome disorder,
And show no evidence of fears?
But I would cry,
Put into the wall that
My mother lies
If I could remember how
And if I had the tears.

We know who we are, don’t we? We serve a living, loving, awesome God. Who loved us enough to send His only Begotten Son. It is time . . .

My life closed twice before its close;
My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive, As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell.

Emily Dickinson (Stobaugh, AMERICAN LIT) uses the metaphor of death to describe the catastrophe that two terrible events caused. Were these the death of two friends? Two unrequited loves? We really don’t know.

What matters is that the pain of these events was so sharp that Dickinson feels as if her life ended. Loss exacerbates Dickinson’s already fragile metaphysics.

What happens after death, in immortality? Well we know, don’t we?

The last two lines of this poem present a powerful paradox; parting is heaven to some and hell to others. We part with those who die and–hopefully–go to heaven, which is, ironically, an eternal happiness for them; however, we who are left behind suffer the pain (hell) of their deaths (parting).

Is there any comfort in this poem? Not if one is the realist Emily Dickinson whose cold New England intellectualism offers scant protection against the frigid exigencies of death! It is fun20to talk about birds walking on sidewalks as long as one does not have to think about ultimate things.

But we all have to think about ultimate things once in a while. In “a while” for most of us is death. Where will you spend eternity? If the Lord Jesus is your Savior you know where you will spend eternity.

Contrast this tentativeness with Dickinson’s New England predecessor Edward Taylor (From “I Prepare a Place”):

But thats not all: Now from Deaths realm, erect, Thou gloriously gost to thy Fathers Hall:
And pleadst their Case preparst them place well dect
All with thy Merits hung. Blesst Mansions all.
Dost ope the Doore locks fast ‘gainst Sins that so These Holy Rooms admit them may thereto.

I like to read Emily Dickinson’s poems. I like to drink vanilla milk shakes too. But not too many and never for nourishment and life. How about you?

In Eudora Welty’s short story “Worn Path,” (from Stobaugh, AMERICAN LITERATURE) the elderly African-American grandmother protagonist, Phoenix, has come to the doctor to obtain medicine for her grandson. But, because of senility, she cannot remember why she came!

The nurse tries to tease out of Phoenix her reason for coming.

“You mustn’t take up our time this way, Aunt Phoenix,” the nurse said. “Tell us quickly about your grandson, and get it over. He isn’t dead, is he?’

At last there came a flicker and then a flame of comprehension across her face, and she spoke.

“My grandson. It was my memory had left me. There I sat and forgot why I made my long trip.”

“Forgot?” The nurse frowned. “After you came so far?”

After coming so far, after working so hard, have we home schoolers forgotten why we came? Are we at the place where we can get the solution to our problems, but have we forgotten why we came?

My wife Karen and I, while we were home schooling our four children, rarely thought of “grand” things. We wanted to teach math and English and maybe science (every other day?) and still get to soccer practice on time! We often forgot why we started doing this thing called home schooling: we wanted to raise a generation of offspring that would advance the Kigndom of God in this time and in this place.

Like Granny Phoenix we just about arrived at our destination but we forgot why we were there!

Then Phoenix was like an old woman begging a dignified forgiveness for waking up frightened in the night. “I never did go to school, I was too old at the Surrender,” she said in a soft voice. “I’m an old woman without an education. It was my memory fail me. My little grandson, he is just the same, and I forgot it in the coming.”

” . . . I forgot it in the coming.” How many of us forget our purpose of this great calling “in the coming?”

Today, in 2009, we need to remind ourselves about why we are doing what we are doing. It is a noble and grand vocation, this home schooling of our kids. Too sacred to trust to anyone else. Let’s do it! Let’s gather around our kitchen tables, in our dingy basements, and let us pause to remember where we are going and why we are doing.it.

“This is what come to me to do,” she said. “I going to the store and buy my child a little windmill they sells, made out of paper. He going to find it hard to believe there such a thing in the world. I’ll march myself back where he waiting, holding it straight up in this hand.”

And while you are remembering why you are doing what you are doing, don’t forget to build a few windmills with the kids. Because it is time. Because it is time.

There is a quietude about my students, a disturbing quiet. A quiet born of years of benign indifference. Indifference and neglect engendered by adults, parents and teachers, who, living in the messed up parts of their lives, have been unable to give students a dream to dream, a song to sing.

The adults are not bad people. Very little malfeasance occurs in this world. There is an abundance of victims, and paucity of perpetrators. Who is to blame for a generation that has no song to sing, no dreams to dream?

Perhaps we all are. The divorced parents who chose their immediate selfish gratification over the investment in laudable perpetual offspring outcomes. The mediocre teachers who never read HUCK FINN, languished in mediocrity, and recreated that mediocrity in their students.

Who is to blame?

Judges 4:3-4 The Israelites cried out for help to the Lord, because Sisera had nine hundred chariots with iron-rimmed wheels, and he cruelly oppressed the Israelites for twenty years. Now Deborah, a prophetess, wife of Lappidoth, was leading Israel at that time.

The land was in turmoil. There was judgement galore, and surely the Israelites deserved it. There were no more dreams, no more songs.

But God raised up an alternative culture, a culture of meritocracy, a culture of hope. Deborah and her colleague Barak scourged the land of its enemies. And song returned to the land . . .

Judges 5:1 On that day Deborah and Barak son of Abinoam sang this victory song:

“When the leaders took the lead in Israel,
When the people answered the call to war
Praise the Lord!
Hear, O kings!
Pay attention, O rulers!
I will sing to the Lord!
I will sing to the Lord God of Israel!
O Lord, when you departed from Seir,
when you marched from Edom’s plains,
the earth shook, the heavens poured down,
the clouds poured down rain.
The mountains trembled before the Lord, the God of Sinai;
before the Lord God of Israel.

Brothers and sisters, let us be the “Deborahs” to this generation. Let us dream dreams, sing songs again.

Christian home schooling, then, moves backward in time, far back in time, when intellectualism was not separate from religion. It blows the claims of the Enlightenment to bits. Home schooling has brought back stability into the lives of countless millions of America when the majority of Americans are living in a context of clashing realities where (as sociologist Kenneth J. Gergen explains “the very ground of meaning, the foundations and structures of thought, language, and social discourse are up for grabs.” When the very concepts of personhood, spirituality, truth, integrity, and objectivity are all being demolished, breaking up, giving way, home schoolers are doing things the old fashion way: parents stay home and love the kids and in the process lay their lives down for all our futures.

Theologian Paul Tillich wrote, “The lightning illuminates all and then leaves it again in darkness. So faith in God grasps humanity, and we respond in ecstasy. And the darkness is never again the same, . . . but it is still the darkness.”

All of God’s saints—past, present, and future—are flashes of of lightning in the sky. And the darkness is never the same again because the light reveals what life can be in Jesus Christ. “Memory allows possibility,” theologian Walter Brueggemann wrote. We home schooling parents bring memory. Our young people bring possibility. And Jesus Christ remains the Way, the Truth and the Life!

I am more hopeful than ever. As sociologist Peter Berger accurately observes, evangelicals (and home schoolers are mostly evangelical) generally subscribe to two strongly held propositions: that a return to Christian values is necessary if the moral confusion of our time is to be overcome, and that the Enlightenment is to be blamed for much of the confusion of our time. The Enlightenment, again, advanced the Platonic idea that good is somehow connected to knowledge. It believed that everyone was good.

Christian home schooling is one of the most potent anti-Enlightenment movements in world history. Christia n home schoolers, argue that the largesse of Enlightenment rationalism has sabotaged the certitude of classicism and Christian theism that so strongly influenced Western culture long before the formidable onslaught of the likes of David Hume.

The fact is, too, that Christian home schoolers are quickly filling the ranks of American’s future leadership corps. Higher test scores is only one reason that home schoolers are capturing the elite culture of America.

The other reason is that our children know they are loved. The Christian psychologist Morton Kelsey argues that the most important component of mental health is that we know, without a doubt, that we are unconditionally loved. Friends, my wife Karen and I were not the best home schooling parents, but, by golly, we knew how to love our kids! And when they graduated from high school t hey knew that at least!

It is this combination of love and truth that is radically changing the social fabric of our nation. Home schoolers, let us proclaim the truth in love across this land. This is our time. Our moment. This movement we call home schooling might be one (but not the only) instrument that God is using to bring revival in this nation.

There is precedence. The American intelligentsia from 1620 to 1750 was radically Christian (i.e., Puritan). This combination of intelligence and spirituality has potent consequences. Christian social thinkers were the most capable urban sociologists in the 19th century much like many Christians are the best playwrights in Hollywood today. Could the home school movement be re-establishing this marriage of intellect and faith that our nation so sorely needs?

The Washington Post in 1993 coyly observed that evangelicals are “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” Evangelical professor Mark Noll unkindly observed, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Indeed. Not anymore. Today, more than ever, in the garb of Christian home schooling, evangelicalism has gained new life.

Christian home schooling has opened up a whole new arena for debate. While conceding that faith is not a makeshift bridge to overcome some Kierkegaardian gap between beliefs and evidence, home schooling posits that it still is important that we look beyond our experience for reality. Reality is more than a two car garage and a membership in the country club. We have discovered that these are hard to own if we live on one income! Besides human needs and aspirations are greater than the world can satisfy, so it is reasonable to look elsewhere for that satisfaction. Worth is the highest and best reality (a decidedly anti-Enlightenment notion) and its genesis and maintenance come exclusively from relationship with God alone. Home schooling families, with its sacrificial love of one another and its extravagant gift of time to one another, offer a radical path into this new way of looking at reality.

A further complication is the fact that lukewarm Christianity, Christianity that is more existential than confessional, is not cutting the mustard. We need to live radical, go-for-broke-lives. As a friend once explained, we homeschoolers don’t make good middle management.

The great religious writer Unamuno created a character, Augusto Perez, in his book Mist, who, through omniscient narration, turned to his maker (e.g., Unamuno) and cries: “Am I to die as a creature of fiction?” Such is the cry of modern humankind. The Christian author and Harvard Professor Robert Coles lamented that we “we have the right to think of ourselves, so rich in today’s America, as in jeopardy sub specie aeternitatis, no matter the size and diversification of his stock portfolio.” As my old, eccentric Harvard Professor Harvey Cox (author of The Secular City ) said, “Americans once had dreams and no knowledge to make them come true. Now Americans have knowledge to make dreams come true but they no longer dream.”

But we are dreaming great dreams, aren’t we home schoolers?

“What is truth?” Pilate asked. (John 18:38) Jesus Christ was concerned about the truth. “I tell you the truth,’ Jesus said, “until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” (Matt. 5:18). And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward.” (Matthew 10:42). And so forth. For over a hundred times Jesus punctuated his aphorisms with this phrase, “I tell you the truth. . .”

Home schoolers are concerned about the truth.

The pursuit of truth is older even than our Lord’s bodily presence on this earth. Besides the Old Testament dialogues about truth (e.g., Proverbs, et al.), secular philosophers were also discussing truth. For example, the Greek philosopher Plato (a contemporary of Daniel) was discussing truth 500 years before Christ was born. In a long, long, time ago, in a place far, far away, Plato was discussing things like truth, politics, justice, and beauty. To Plato the pursuit of truth was the beginning and ending of all things. Plato was convinced, for instance, that if people knew the truth they would obey the truth. Plato argued that if people knew the right thing to do they would do it. In other words, immorality was nothing mor e than ignorance.

Of course, we who live on the backside of Auschwitz, The Great Leap Forward, and September 11, 2001, know that that is absurd. People are quite capable of knowing the truth and acting immorally. In fact they do it all the time. Sometimes really smart people can make very bad choices.

We all know that “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away; they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” (Romans 3:10b-12) Everyone sins. Smart people also make bad choices. Indeed. Homeschoolers have to be more than smart—we have to be reedeemed! And redemption is not dependent upon what we know; it is dependent upon who we know.

While I was a graduate student at Harvard I lived outside Harvard Yard. New to the area, while I was traveling to class one day, I found myself hopelessly lost. Seeing some august, famous professors traveling at deliberate speed toward their destination I was sure that they knew the way to the Promised Land (i.e., Danforth Hall gate at the Yard). The truth was, I doubted for a few moments - in fact as I followed these capable, sagacious professors I remembered a better way. But, no, what did I know! These were the world’s smartest me n—but I was very late to my history class! They were more lost than I!

I am glad that I know the One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton, in his essay “Reflections on Rudolph Eichmann,” shows how very likeable, intelligent, “moral” individuals can do monstrous things. Eichmann, and his henchmen were architects of the Holocaust where 6-8 million Jews were murdered. Merton concludes, “One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane.”

We cannot merely be right, home schoolers, we must be saved.

by Julia

Eudora Welty’s famous short stories continue to capture the imagination of readers everywhere. She is never predictable, never angry, but so brutally honest This great, and sometimes terrible, truth is seen most clearly through her characters. They are the beautiful, the slave, the child, and the tortured soul: Welty writes through the eyes of a hundred different people. One of her stories, “The Worn Path,” demonstrates this. Welty uses the journey of an old Negro woman to turn an otherwise unnoticed, but no less extraordinary, occurrence into something redeeming. “A Worn Path” tells the story of Phoenix Jackson, a grandmother who sets out on a long walk to town.

Welty’s motif is very consistent throughout the text. Rather like a small child on some great treasure quest, so Jackson marches along, refusing to allow anything to stop her. Her childlike determination is seen through a constant dialogue with the surrounding forest and herself. Behind an old, poor, beaten down woman there is a voice of great innocence. Behind her childish and naive murmurings, however Grandma Jackson is really a wise woman.

“Old Phoenix said, `Out of my way, all you foxes, owls, beetles, jack rabbits, coons and wild animals!…Keep out from under these feet, little bob-wwhites…Keep the big wild hogs out of my path. Don’t let nonne of those come running in my direction. I got a long way.’ Under her small black-freckled hand her cane, limber as a buggy whip, wo uld switch at the brush as if to rouse up any hiding things.”

Jackson’s journey is both literal and figurative. In the story, she is walking a worn path to town, and in her head, instead of absentmindedly thinking, she is journeying through her life. In this, the reader sees the true purpose of Welty’s motif. Despite the fact that Jackson is half-blind and over eighty-years old, she does not see her treacherous path as particularly dangerous. She plods it with the same determination that has characterized the rest of her life. There is no turning back. She is bigger, stronger, faster, and smarter. In Jackson’s mind, the odds are already overcome; she has traveled this journey many times before. She knows her strength, choosing to forget her handicaps:

“At the foot of this hill was a place where a log was laid across the creek.
`Now comes the trial,’ said Phoenix.
Putting her right foot out, she mounted the log and shut her eyes. Lifting her skirt, leveling her cane fiercely before her, like a festival figure in some parade, she began to march across. Then she opened her eyes and she was safe on the other said.
`I wasn’t as old as I thought,’ she said.”

Welty reminds the reader of Jackson’s true self by infusing the plot with visual imagery. In her own picture of herself, Jackson is not only an old woman, but also a great hero. However, Welty offers moments, flashes of time, when the reader is jolted back into reality, and realizes Jackson’s true identity:

“A black dog with a lolling tongue came up out of the weeds by the ditch. She was meditating, and not ready, and when he came at her she only hit him a little with her cane. Over she went in the ditch, like a little puff of milkweed.

Down there, her senses drifted away…`Olld woman,’ she said to herself, `that black dog come up out of the weeds to stall you off, and now there he sitting on his fine tail, smiling at you.”

The description, “little puff of milkweed” compares Jackson to a small, pale, fragile flower. Her tumble into the ditch reminds both herself, and the reader, that the journey is not over, but she is not as young as before. Jackson’s attitude suggests that, perhaps, if one forgets their inabilities, their flaws and weaknesses, there is a possibility of achieving great things despite one’s limitations.
Phoenix Jackson has had a long journey through life. As a black woman, her experiences have been more difficult than most. Just as she fearlessly travels to bring her little grandson medicine, so she continues to travel through life. She accepts no help and asks for no favors. Her pride is laughable to some, yet there is a great dignity that she makes no attempt to hide. Her journey is the journey, not only of herself, but also of her family, of her heritage