Chunks of ice are crashing, sliding, crashing off our back roof, and every time a piece falls the cat jumps like he's been shot. I stepped out the back door this morning into weather that feels like March: 35 degrees and the air dense and damp.
I've started reading Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Buried Giant and am finishing the last sad pages of Emily Gillespie's diary.
August 16, 1881: . . . I sometimes think of words which different women have told me in my girl-hood--that--"woman is always lovely--untill her strength & beauty fails, then--she is--only in the way"--it seems almost invariably true, yet we will try to say & think--all is well. . . .
November 1, 1882: Tis 20 minutes past nine. [Her daughter] Sarah started at 5 minutes past nine . . . though I grieve that she has gone, I feel tis all right. she wants to do what she can to make money so as to get ready to try to go to College. . . . Yes, they [her children] are both gone. . . . O but I miss their society so much, though if I know they are doing well, I feel better about it. now I must go to work. . . .
March 27, 1883: I finish my night-gown &c. go to Town with [her husband] James. he feels better natured--I am thankful he does. I sometimes think tis a real disease that some people have to have a time every so often, they seem to get so full of some undefinable thing they must explode.
2 comments:
I looked up Emily Gillespie after reading your excerpts. That poor woman -- and her daughter, too.
On a side note, there is an eyebrow-raising comment (and a tart rejoinder to it) on the Amazon page for the Sarah Huftalen's diary: https://www.amazon.com/All-Will-Yet-Well-Gillespie/dp/0877454221
Lord, what a comment! Ay yi yi.
I've read some descriptions of the daughter, Sarah's, diary, and it sounds as if she in some ways repeated her mother's tragedy. It's equally sad to me that the son, Henry, turned out to be so cruel to his sister because his mother had such hopes for his humanity.
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