When One Is So Far from Home, Life Is a Mix of Fact and Fiction
by Naomi Shihab NyeNo one should hold that against you. It's a means of survival. Sometimes I thought my best talent was taking a skinny story, adding wings and a tail. Dressing it in a woolen Bedouin cloak with stitching around the edges. Putting a headdress on it. Making a better picture. Your mother got mad at me sometimes for telling a story differently but it wasn't a lie, just a story in different clothes with other things emphasized. My own mother dressed up stories for 106 years till that last winter she rode in her bed like a boat, sitting up to sleep. Maybe it's our duty to be shaped a hundred times by the same stories. We think we're telling them but really they're keeping us alive, memory oxygen breathed out and in.
