Real Snow The dust stopped,...

Real Snow

The dust stopped,
and it
snowed.
Real snow.
Dreamy Christmas snow,
gentle,
nothing blowing,
such calm,
like after a fever,
wet,
clinging to the earth,
melting into the dirt,
snow.

Oh, the grass, and the wheat
and the cattle,
and the rabbits,
and my father will be happy.

November 1934 - P97

<Dance Revue>
He doesn’t look at me like I’m a poor motherless thing. He doesn’t stare at my deformed hands. He looks at me like I am someone he knows, someone named Billie Jo Kelby. I’m grateful for that, especially considering how bad I’m playing.
December 1934 - P98

[오늘의 한문장] The Grapes of Wrath

TO THE RED COUNTRY and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover. In the last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more. The weeds grew darker green to protect themselves, and they did not spread any more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country.

Ma has been nursing these two...

Ma has been nursing these two trees for as long as I can remember. In spite of the dust, in spite of the drought, because of Ma’s stubborn care, these trees are thick with blossoms, delicate and pinky-white. - P55

My eyes can’t get enough of the sight of them. I stand under the trees and let the petals fall into my hair, a blizzard of sweet-smelling flowers, dropped from the boughs of the two placed there in the front yard by Ma before I was born, that she and they might bring forth fruit into our home,
together. May 1934 - P55

[오늘의 한문장] Out of the Dust (Scholastic Gold)

I look at Joe and know our future is drying up and blowing away with the dust."

— Out of the Dust (Scholastic Gold) (Newbery Medal Book) by Karen Hesse
https://a.co/3R0vAnx

We buried them together on th...

We buried them together on the rise Ma loved, the one she gazed at from the kitchen window, the one that looks out over the dried-up Beaver River. - P79

"Billie Jo threw the pail," they said. "An accident," they said. Under their words a finger pointed. They didn’t talk about my father leaving kerosene by the stove. They didn’t say a word about my father drinking himself into a stupor while Ma writhed, begging for water. They only said, Billie Jo threw the pail of kerosene. August 1934 - P80

I walk to town. I don’t look back over my shoulder at the single grave holding Ma and my little brother. I am trying not to look back at anything. - P81

My father stares out across his land, empty but for a few withered stalks like the tufts on an old man’s head. I don’t know if he thinks more of Ma, or the wheat that used to grow here. - P81

My father will stay, no matter what, he’s stubborn as sod. He and the land have a hold on each other. But what about me? - P83

I don’t know my father anymore. He sits across from me, he looks like my father, he chews his food like my father, he brushes his dusty hair back like my father, but he is a stranger. - P84

I am awkward with him, and irritated, and I want to be alone but I am terrified of being alone. - P84

The water will seep back into the earth. It’ll never stay put in any old pond. But my father has thought through all that and he’s digging anyway. - P85

But as long as I live, no matter how big a hole he digs, I can’t forgive him that pail of kerosene left by the side of the stove. September 1934 - P86

How can such a flower find a way to bloom in this drought, in this wind. - P89

I couldn’t watch at dawn, when the flower, touched by the first finger of morning light, wilted and died. I couldn’t watch as the tender petals burned up in the sun. September 1934 - P89

Without the sod the water vanished, the soil turned to dust. Until the wind took it, lifting it up and carrying it away. Such a sorrow doesn’t come suddenly, there are a thousand steps to take before you get there. - P91

The Path of Our Sorrow
But now, sorrow climbs up our front steps, big as Texas, and we didn’t even see it coming, even though it’d been making its way straight for us all along.
September 1934 - P92