Portland , Ore
May 27, 1966.
Dear __

... I was thinking that I had never talked to ___ about an older brother he had who died, long ago. I had a horrible time having the children, as I was much too old and with set muscles. I was very active and sports minded before marriage. Also, the kids were bigger than the dickens! ____ was the smallest and least trouble. I was in labor with the first nearly 60 hours and the doctor who was a devout Catholic couldn’t operate so he thought I would die. I didn’t know until later how many friends I had, who were praying for me. They told me that Dr. Boettner spent his whole lunch hour on his knees before the Blessed Sacrament and right after he came back to the hospital the baby was born. The baby had curly, yellow hair and was remarkably intelligent. Just before ____ was born he died and, of course, I burst into poetry. I thought everyone wrote poetry because my Dad did, but found out that George’s family thought poets were all nuts.

Consequently, I ceased this. My Dad had a whole trunk full of manuscripts when he died which my mother immediately burned, so I couldn’t pass on their worth. I have only one poem extant which he wrote on their 25th wedding anniversary. Rather good. My mother was a spoiled brat. She was his pupil when he taught school and I think, in retrospect, that the teacher pupil relationship always held. When he was dying she neither came to the hospital nor inquired about him. Violet, Gerald’s wife and son Terence were visiting at our house at the time. So he died Calling for her and she did not come. Before he lapsed into a coma, he sent the nurse out so he could talk to me. He told me he was so sorry that I had had to work so hard and carry so much responsibility. He said it had been his greatest ambition to send me to Berkeley, but he wasn’t able to. Also, he said he was so sorry Gerald was a snob as he wanted him to be a real person.

My Dad was immensely intelligent but remarkably naive and absent-minded. He should have continued teaching but teachers in those “good old days” were not paid a living wage and my mother was social minded and very extravagant. He turned his mathematical ability into doing engineering work for a lumber company and the Dept. of Interior, so he had a small pension when they retired him at age 65.

He lived one year longer, working very hard all that time. I think the hardest thing he had to cope with was associating with the rough elements he found in the lumber camps of those early days. Of course, he was a huge man and very strong.  No one ever bothered him or he would have really knocked them about. His eyes were icy blue when he was angry. But it was the vulgar talk and the illiteracy and drunkenness that really bothered him. Many times he would sleep outside in the fresh outdoors rather than be a part of it.

He loved the woods and all the animals. I remember that there was a period of amorphic representation of animals in fiction, and this really infuriated him, as he knew animals as they were. He organized the Biological Survey for U.S. and had many workers under him to kill predators. His remonstrations with the “powers that be” went for naught.  He knew that all the bobcats, coyotes, lynx, wolves were destroyed that rodents would take over. This is what has happened and we are still paying for it.

I had neglected them. My mother had a series of small strokes and the last three years of her life I had to keep her in a small, private hospital with proper nursing care. In those days it would be called a nursing home. Gerald didn’t like us in those days as his mother-in-law really went for Christian Science. Actually, my mother had first taken sick many years before and Doug an I left school to carry on as she was bed-ridden for a year. I was eleven and Doug about 4 years older. He got a job in a mill and I did the housework. Pa said there was no reason a big girl like I was, couldn’t do all the work, since help was hard to come by. So I learned to cook by experience and the house was big and inconvenient. I made High School in 2 years, however, as I already had one year when I had to stay home. Doug and I graduated together.

Doug was a great favorite of my mother. We didn’t want to tell Gerald how hard things were as he was so far away at West Point and it was so important to him to stay in school. But Doug later got two degrees as he was a smart one and a great personality kid--always talking and making friends. He had bright, red hair and I was quite content to tag along in his shadow. He was accident-prone and I felt responsible for him. I remember saving his life 2 times but he ended up with one leg and one eye. I really don’t think that Gerald knows much about what happened after he left for West Point. My mother had always spent a lot of money on him and he [????] abandoned her in her later years.

He didn’t see my Dad for 15 years before the old man died. I notified him when Pa died, which I thought was right, and he came over from Honolulu, but he seemed to be completely furious with me. 25 years later they moved to the States and he came to see us then. That was in 1955. He didn’t know any of the kids and they didn’t seem to please him. They were busy and dirty, as most boys are.  Dom kept calling him Doug which infuriated him. In fact he gets furious very easily.

My mother married young but didn’t have him, Her oldest, until five years later and then the other brother came when he was five or six. Meanwhile, my mother had her brother, Walter, to live with them, so that to Gerald, Walt seems more like a brother than his own. Grandpa had died and Grandma had to work. Grandpa was a very large, red-haired Scotsman who came to  Canada as an adult and stayed only because he married my grandmother. He didn’t like pants and wore his kilts all the time except when he went into town when Grandma made him dress “decently.” Grandma was very small with black hair and she was very Irish and hard-working. She was of Welsh descent. Her grandfather came from Conway in Wales. The Welsh people are the Romano-British Celts who were pushed to that rugged mountainous land by invading Germanic tribes, Saxons and Anglos and Danes. Grandma had four daughters who were gentle and soft-hearted like grandpa, except my mother who was smaller and brighter and very spoiled by the older girls. The only son was born later and raised by his sisters and my mother and father.

I remember Grandma very clearly. she came out west to take care of my mother who had a new baby when I was three years old. Grandma let me sleep with her in her bedroom upstairs and let me share her hot tea which had lots of sugar in it. Sometimes she pinned up her long skirts and danced jigs barefoot with a tambourine for me. She told me not to tell on her as her family were Quakers and not supposed to dance. I think she was really part gypsy. She could tell fortunes and her mother had what is called “second sight.” There were many gypsies in Wales in the old days.

One day they closed my mother’s bedroom door and wouldn’t let me in. Her spaniel dog slipped in when a strange man came in with a black bag. I could hear them trying to get the dog out from under the bed with a broom, but at last they gave up. I tried to get in but Grandma plumped me down vigorously in my red rocking chair and said I was to stay put. So I rocked and cried and rocked and cried, “Let me see she.” over and over but the door stayed closed. The next day I awoke in Grandma’ s bed and I found out my mother had acquired a new baby which I regarded as my property.

[poem about Valentine]

I will write it out for you before I throw it away with all the others as it isn’t good. 

Pray for a Child who Died Young.
So little time you had to stay,
Yellow curls and laughter gay.
You tried to tell me you must go. 
I only thought, “I love you so.”
You’d scarcely tried the rugged way,
Then very gently went away.
How long, how long the days run on!
The endless years since you are gone!

Very sophomoric.
What a letter! Wow!
Love, Mama