Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered

7The years took all the fight out of Janie’s face. For a while shethought it was gone from her soul. No matter what Jody did, she saidnothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was arut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was keptbeaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future,imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she livedbetween her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances likeshade patterns in the woods—come and gone with the sun. She gotnothing from Jody except what money could buy, and she was givingaway what she didn’t value.Now and again she thought of a country road at sun-up and consideredflight. To where? To what? Then too she considered thirty-fiveis twice seventeen and nothing was the same at all.“Maybe he ain’t nothin’,” she cautioned herself, “but he issomething in my mouth. He’s got tuh be else Ah ain’t got nothin’ tuhlive for. Ah’ll lie and say he is. If Ah don’t, life won’t be nothin’ but uhstore and uh house.”She didn’t read books so she didn’t know that she was the worldand the heavens boiled down to a drop. Man attempting to climb topainless heights from his dung hill.Then one day she sat and watched the shadow of herself goingabout tending store and prostrating itself before Jody, while all thetime she herself sat under a shady tree with the wind blowing throughher hair and her clothes. Somebody near about making summertimeout of lonesomeness.