What was your favorite or most memorable descriptive passage?

Brown captivated this reader with the gift of writing the most wonderful sensory words to describe her characters, their actions, settings, and emotions. I will never be able to just peel and eat a naval orange again:). What was your favorite or most memorable descriptive passage?

"What is this place? I thought walking back into the river and diving down into it. What is this place where everything is all of a piece, where tobacco seeds and stars are linked, and the moon ripens plums, and the river water is soft green velvet? What is this place and who are these people, I wondered, touching the silt at the river's bottom......."

pages 196-197
And I saw her (Granma) as a thirty-year-woman, a lonely woman, who missed her grandmother she remembered and wondered about the mother she didn't, whose face sometimes took on a secret startled look when an old crow word coughed up from some cranny in her brain, flew like a host bird and then back out again.

You're a girl as long as you let life happen to you. You become a woman when you start living according to your own instincts, your own intelligence and your own desires. You're a woman when you take hold of yoursef.

I agree with darylb that the description of girlhood and womanhood was the most memorable passage. I also loved the passage about her mother's perfume recipe: I realized they were a poem, both poem and enchantment, recipe and prayer, a code for an invisible kind of beauty to be conjured with things of the earth.

As I read the book, I had dog-eared the page with the same quote that darylb posted... that passage really resonated with me. I realized bit by bit over a period of many years that I myself had remained a "girl" for far too long, in the sense of letting life happen to me, as Gramma explained to Margie. I learned to shift my thinking from the idea that “things happen to you” to the being-in-control-of-your-life idea that you have to make things happen yourself. if you believe it’s in your power to make things happen, you will put in the effort to see the changes you desire. I was so relieved that Margie realized that she wanted Jim, and went back and made the first move!

The girl to woman passage resonated most, followed by the perfume formula. This book was filled with passages that kept floating into my thoughts and I really enjoyed pondering over them. I believe this is a book that I will read a second time.