What Women Endure For Love

Even back in Janie's time and age, women weren't looked to as men's equals.  Women, no matter what the century, date and age, no matter where they live, we all endure physical, verbal, emotional, and sexual abuses one way or another.  I sometimes wonder, is it really all worth it? Is love really worth the hurt and the pain?  I suppose, if we find the "right one," it would all be worth the hurt and the pain, right?  A friend once asked me, "How do I know when I've found her, the right one?" and I had to answer, " I don't know! I guess, you'd just know!" Like how Zora Neale Hurston describes when Janie loves Tea Cake:

"She couldn't make him look just like any other man to her. He looked like the love thoughts of women.  He could be a bee to a blossom - a pear tree blossom in the spring."  

This is how love is, I suppose, whenever you look at him, you get butterflies in your stomach and love just overflows, and you think to yourself, "I am the luckiest woman to have this wonderful man loving me."  Although, it may take a while, like Janie, to find the "right" apple from the apple tree, to find the right color, find the right taste, find one that looks appealing, then take a bite to see if the taste fits to your liking. That's probably why Janie went through 3 different marriages, 3 different kind of loves, 3 different lifestyles to find the one to her like.  And with the luck in this sinful world, when you find the "right one," it doesn't usually last very long because we, humans, just don't want things to ever end: the end of the world, the end of membership to a nice, expensive restaurant, the end to a really good movie, the end of a really good meal, the expiration of something we really want and like.  So sad for Janie to have found her love then, to have lost it.  But, "Better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all!" Another nice saying I like to use.  ;o)

Besides the dialog being harder to read and turn out the word, overall, Zora Neale Hurston uses such touching words to describe how she wants the reader to feel the emotions and actions her characters are also feeling.   Some parts in the book are so moving, so beautifully described and written that I wish I'd written something like that:"Oh, to be a pear tree - any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!"  If only this was so!