“…But in the meantime, you got to remember, you can’t always judge people by the things they done. You got to judge them by what they are doing now.”

“What truth?” I asked her.

“Why, that war is hell,” Miss Franny said with her eyes still closed. “Pure hell.”

“Hell is a cuss word,” said Amanda. I stole a look at her. Her face was pinched up even more than usual.

“War,” said Miss Franny with her eyes still closed, “should be a cuss word, too.”

I didn’t go to sleep right away. I lay there and thought how life was like a Littmus Lozenge, how the sweet and the sad were all mixed up together and how hard it was to separate them out. It was confusing.

“There ain’t no way you can hold on to something that wants to go, you understand? You can only love what you got while you got it.”

Thinking about her was the same as the hole you keep on feeling with your tongue after you lose a tooth.