Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it's no worse than it is.
Burdens are for shoulders strong enough to carry them.
Merely a matter of time. Hard times were just temporary.
Somewhere, on the long road that wound through those four years, the girl with her sachet and dancing slippers had slipped away and there was left a woman with sharp green eyes, who counted pennies and turned her hands to many menial tasks, a woman to whom nothing was left from the wreckage except the indestructible red earth on which she stood.