“How egotistical we are to believe that when someone dies, they leave their spirit with people. Yes, I carry my mother‘s DNA, but she left herself equally with that patch of earth, where she had always offered her best self.”
12 likes2 stack adds
Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir | 
“How egotistical we are to believe that when someone dies, they leave their spirit with people. Yes, I carry my mother‘s DNA, but she left herself equally with that patch of earth, where she had always offered her best self.”
“...it came to me that we are as much of a place as we are of a people; that we return to places because our hands served as tender shovels in that earth. That those yellow-peach and cream colored roses, that wild yerba buena, las verdolagas covering the earth like loosely woven cloth to catch the steady drop of rose petal and leaf, this was my mother‘s constant site of comfort.”
“For my mother, meals were the site of familia. Her capacity to feed us was her capacity to mother us. So when we were not present, she ate with the awareness of a place reserved for us at her table.”
Next up on audio, a memoir about a mother-daughter relationship and Mexican-American history.
Turns out, Moraga has been an important Chicano writer and queer feminist thinker for years. But this is the first I've heard of her. 😕
pickSecond great memoir this weekend!!!
Absolutely gorgeous memoir. Spanish phrases were beautifully woven into the narrative and i especially loved how the author sticks strictly to her POV in the moments of her life, allowing the narrative to unfold to the reader as it did for her without the benefit of hindsight or foreshadowing. #netgalley
