My Grandma Nelson was the slowest walker anyone swore they had
ever seen, her two stick legs tottering down the street in ever
uncertain relation to its surface, pure will hardly able to accept
confinement to so frail a form. Her diaries, too, had this feeling of fitful
propulsion, each day’s events recorded with a doggedness that
seemed to suggest, in its painstaking sweep, the exertions of a planet
that must spin not at once, but degree by degree, as it laboriously
traces its orbit.

– from Life in America (essay)

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