by Jan Karon
I’ve read something wonderful. “Deep in their roots,” Roethke said, “all flowers keep the light.”
My mind went at once to my tulips, frozen into the black soil of the bed you helped me dig. My imagination burrowed in like a mole and saw, in the center of a frozen bulb, a green place—quick and alive and radiant and indefatigable, the force that survives every winter blast and flies up, in spite of itself, to greet spring.
I am keeping the light, dearest. But sometimes it grows so faint; I’m frightened that I shall lose it entirely.
Why am I not doing the things I should be doing? Going to the library and the bookshops, seeing plays, hearing concerts, looking at great art?
The answer is, there’s scarcely anything left of me after bending over the drawing board for hours, and so I send out for Chinese or make the quick walk to the café and am in bed before the late news, only to find I cannot sleep!
I am, however, going faithfully to confirmation class at the little church around the corner, every Thursday evening—and liking it very much.
I pray for us to have long walks together, to dash out into the rain and jump into puddles! Would you jump into puddles with me? I think not, but it’s a hope I shall cherish, for it makes me smile to think of it.
Now that I’ve gotten out of bed, and located the stationery, and rounded up the pen and filled it with ink, and fluffed up the pillows, and adjusted the lamp, and told you I can’t sleep, I’m nodding off!
Life is so odd. I can’t make heads or tails of it. I’m glad you’re a parson and can.
Lovingly yours, C
My dearest C,
Have been pondering our dinner here before you vanished into the sky in that minuscule plane. I can’t seem to remember what I fed you, when or how I prepared it, nor even discussing the order with Avis. Though I was sober as a judge, I think I was in a kind of daze—the most I can recall is that we danced, I asked you the question that was so infernally difficult, and you were tender and patient and full of laughter.
This recollection should be more than enough, yet I’m astounded at such a lapse. Something was clearly going on that had little to do with either dinner or dancing and causes me to consider the wisdom of Aiken’s poem:
“Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread…”
So glad you called last night. It was no disturbance at all, quite the contrary. I hope it’s some comfort, however small, that you can call me anytime.
Do you hear? Anytime. Please take this to heart.
* * *
I can neither eat nor sleep for thinking of you my dearest love, I never touch even pudding.
—Horatio Nelson to Lady Emma Hamilton, 1800
* * *
I’ve been in parishes where the phone might ring at any hour, from midnight to morning. Mitford, however, is a reserved parish, and I think the last late-hour call was from Hoppy’s wife who was in the agony of dying and wanted prayer—not for herself, but for him.
It occurs to me that I’m not only your neighbor and friend, C, but your parson, as well. All of which seems to make a tight case for your freedom to call me as your heart requires it.
With fondest love to you tonight and prayers for sleeping like an infant,
Timothy
My dear Bookend,
I’ve had a load of wood carted in and a more splendid fire you’ve never seen. All this seems to occasion a letter, though I just sent one to you yesterday morning.
A meeting was canceled, thanks be to God. Dooley is spending the night with Tommy, and Barnabas is amused with scratching himself. Wish you were here. It is another night of jollity in our frozen village.
I’ve just heard from Fr Roland in New Orleans, who complains that my letters to him have dried up like a pond in a drought. Can’t imagine why.
Am cooking a pork roast and a pot of navy beans, one more reason I wish you were here. I told Puny I needed to put my hand in again, so she did the shopping with Avis, and I’m handling the rest.
The house is fairly perfumed with a glorious smell, which causes me to remember Mother’s kitchen. She always added orange rind to a pork roast and a bit of brandy. Her strong favorite with any roast was angel biscuits, so named for their habit of floating off the plate and hovering above the platter.
I can’t help but think how my father never came to the table when called. He would sometimes wait until we were finished or the food had grown cold before sitting down without a word. I remember my mother’s disappointment and my own white fury, which often spoiled the meal she had laid.
Later, I could see it was his way of controlling the household, of being the emperor, far above the base need for eating, for loving, for feeling. I remember his refusal of anesthesia when he had an operation on his leg and again a serious abscess on his jaw.
If my mother had not been fashioned of something akin to marzipan, my father’s composition of steel would have been my very death.
But why do I waste ink telling you this? It came into the room with the fragrance from the pots and would not let me be.
Sometimes I consider not mailing a letter I’ve written to you, but you insisted that nothing should be struck through or torn up or unmailed, so there you have it.
Someone has said again that I should work on the book of essays I’ve long considered. Perhaps when I retire, if I ever do such a thing.
Stuart says I should be making plans for retirement—but his advice made me want to say, oh, stop being a bishop and let me stumble around and fall in a blasted ditch if that’s what it takes.
I am homesick for your spirit.
With love,
Timothy
Darling Timothy,
I’ve dried the lavender and tied it into small bundles that are tucked everywhere. Here are a few sprigs for your pillow. If that seems too twee, as the English say, perhaps you’ll find a place for them in your sock drawer.
I’ve plucked every petal from every faded rose and have two bowls filled with their lingering fragrance. I cannot let them go! I’m enclosing a handful of petals for you to scatter over the last of the snow.
James says the new book must be a different format than the Violet books and even larger than Mouse in the Manger. “These creatures must have room to breathe!” he says, and I do agree. I’m going to the publishing house tomorrow afternoon and work with the designer. I shall be thrilled to have someone to talk with, though the lovely people who run the café do make the days go faster. I wish you could meet them.
The weather is still terrible here. A water main froze and broke in the neighborhood, and the streets have been flooded for two days. I’ve bought fleece-lined boots after weeks of tripping around in the footwear of a Southern schoolgirl!
I got your letter mailed Saturday a.m. You must have given it wings! Thank you for writing about your father. One day, I shall tell you about mine. Alas, there was no steel in him at all. He was constructed entirely of charm, French cigarettes, and storytelling. He was often sad, utterly defenseless, and I loved him madly. He was thrilled that I was a girl, once saying that he didn’t know what he would have done with a little person who wanted to kick around a football or go fly-fishing.
Oh, Timothy! I feel wretched. I cannot look at another zebra, another wildebeest, and certainly no more armadillos! I am so very tired.
I want more than anything to scratch through that last remark or start over, for that is what my mother always said. She always said she was tired, and I vowed never to say it, especially to you. But I am tired, and there you have it. I am exhausted in every bone.
I should love to kiss you over and over. Like at the airport. Our kisses made me feel I was flying, long before I got on the little plane. I am weary of having my feet on the ground, dearest. I should like to poke my head in the clouds!
With inexpressible longings,
Your loving bookend
Dearest Bookend,
Hang in
there. i have just this moment heard a male cardinal singing. He is sitting on the branch of an icebound bush outside the office window. It is so reviving to hear his song i had to tell you at once. It has gone on and on, as if he can’t bear to end it. His mate swoops and dives about the bush, expressing her own glad joy for the sunshine that is with us at last. Let this be a comfort, somehow, and a hope for us. Am off to Wesley with Dooley to buy a parka, as his was ripped on a fence when we delivered Christmas baskets. Know this comes with tenderest love and fervent prayer, and yes, my own longings.
yrs, timothy
A Light in the Window, Ch. 7
My Bookend,
The winter here continues bitter and dark, the work on the book goes poorly, and my heart aches for the consolation of your company. Even so, I am keeping the light…
A Light in the Window, Ch. 8
Dearest Timothy,
Miss Addison had a cocktail party, as she calls it, for four cats in the building. Thank goodness, Violet was not able to go, as she has just had a shot and was not feeling sociable.
According to the superintendent, who came to fix my faucet, Miss Addison’s butler or footman or whatever he is put little heaps of catnip on a silver tray and set the tray on the drawing room floor.
All the cats, it’s reported, went absolutely berserk.
They climbed Miss Addison’s silk shantung draperies and gave her Louis XIV sofa a good drubbing with their claws. Then they leapt onto the kitchen counter and gobbled up the smoked salmon intended for the horrified people who owned the cats.
It’s enough to make one wish for a dog.
Miss Addison said she was told that catnip is a spring tonic and ordered this stuff all the way from a farm in upstate New York. I had entertained the thought of buying some for Violet but have squelched this notion permanently.
Our streets are full of a general sloshiness that lingers and won’t go away, as if a glacier is deicing to the north. I forgot to ask on Sunday if anything has poked its head up in my perennial bed. Would you look? I am so homesick I can hardly bear it. I’ve worked on this stupid book until my eyes are crossing. You won’t recognize me. At the airport, you will peer at me and say, “Cynthia?” Then you’ll mutter, “No, no, can’t be,” and walk on.
But oh, this book will be good, I think. I really do believe so. Everyone here seems excited about it, and I pray fervently it will be loved by its readers. Do you know that one of my favorite things is seeing a child reading one of my books? They don’t even have to like it. It is merely the sight of a small head bowed over the pages that gives me indescribable joy.
Do you feel the same when your sermons pierce our hearts and convict us of something that must be carried forth or changed in ourselves?
Thank you for sending your typed sermon. I needed to hear all of it. Yes! Intimacy is always about openness, about transparency. Until the Holy Spirit led me into intimacy with Christ, I was as transparent as your iron skillet. It is terribly scary to go around with your very spleen on display, yet, how can He shine through anything that is not made transparent? Well, of course, He could—but well, you understand.
I loved your note confessing that your feelings for me have made you more transparent. Sometimes—well, only once, actually—I’ve felt a little guilty for falling in love with you. Guilty that I have taken something from you, something very private. I try not to dwell on this.
With much love from
Your bookend
the office
thursday, fog on the heels of sunshine, 56 deg., barnabas snoring, emma making deposit dear Lord! taken something from me? words cannot express what you have given, do give. that you would love me at all continues to perplex me, i am sorry to say. as we go into Lent ii ponder again and again how the apostles must have felt at losing him, at losing the love that had captured and ennobled and given them something higher than they could have ever known without him. there must have been the deepest despair and disbelief, greater than the ordinary loss of a loved one, until the Holy Spirit arrived on the scene and filled in the blanks. ii have known something of loss, also, in these weeks, these months you have been away, months in which winter has breathed its frost upon our spirits continually. yet i think it is good somehow that we discovered, confessed our feelings for one another and were forced apart to think it through. that at least is true for me, and i am being philosophical about it at the moment. at other moments i could not ask for anything more than to have you here and cook your supper. Afterward, we might sit by the fire and look at the new garden catalogs. there, now, I’ve run you away with the prospect of such dull evenings, while you might be at the club playing cards or doing the tango.
please do not ever think that you have taken anything from me, but know that you have given me something too precious and amazing to contemplate. and never worry that i won’t recognize you. ii would know those blue eyes anywhere, crossed or no.
i kiss you. God bless you and keep you. marge and hal pray for you, as does dooley on occasion.
harold cometh
love, timothy
P.S. nothing poking up, will advise
A Light in the Window, Ch. 9
Dear Timothy,
Hanging up on you was a silly and immature thing to do, but I couldn’t help it. It just happened. Something came over me.
Your note arrived, telling me about the mix-up, and I’ve tried to feel remorseful for what I did. Actually, I don’t feel one bit remorseful, but I do feel forgiving.
As I thought how you flew to New York to surprise and comfort me, the ice around my heart began to melt and I could not help but love you.
Hasn’t our timing, and especially mine, been atrocious? If only I had been here when you arrived, do you think things might have been different? Do you think the ice around your own heart might have melted for eternity?
I’ve decided I will come home to Mitford at the end of the month and live there always, no matter what the future holds. Nothing can run me away again, not even a neighbor who is kind and loving one moment and distant and indifferent the next.
Somehow, the mention of marriage has strained even the sweet pleasure we found in going steady. It is grieving to think we might throw it all away because we’ve come to a hard place in the road and cannot cross over it. One would think that two people with brains in their heads could stand in the road and ponder the obstacle and come up with some ingenious way of getting over or round it! I mean, look what Mr. Edison, quite alone, managed to do with the lightbulb!
Perhaps we could be friends, Timothy. But it’s time for me to quit suggesting what we might do or be together and let it rest in God’s hands.
If you think that sounds spiritually noble, it is not. I simply don’t know what else to do.
Cynthia
A Light in the Window, Ch. 13
Dear Cynthia,
It won’t be long until lights will burn again in the darkened windows of the little yellow house; bushes will bloom, trees will leaf out, the wrens will build a nest under your eave. So, hurry home, and help these good things to happen.
If you’ll let me know when you’re arriving, I’d like to fetch you from the airport.
All is well here, only one upset which I’ll tell you about. Am investigating schools for Dooley. Thankfully, there are quite a few out there, but must get some tutoring into him before fall. Will likely go on a tour of schools as soon as his classes at Mitford School are over in June.
We will be glad to have you home.
Love, Timothy
A Light in the Window, Ch. 14
My dearest husband,
I regret that I snapped at you this morning. You snapped, I snapped. And for what? As you left, looking hurt, I wanted to run after you and hold you, but I could not move. I stood upstairs on the landing and moped at the window like a schoolgirl, watching as you went along the sidewalk.
I saw you stop for a moment and look around, as if you wanted to turn back. You seemed forlor
n, and I was overcome with sorrow for anything I might ever do to give you pain. My darling Timothy, who means all the world to me—forgive me.
It was the slightest thing between us, something that would hardly matter to anyone else, I think. We are both so sensitive, so alike in that region of the heart which fears rejection and resists chastisement.
As I looked down upon you, I received your hurt as my own, and so have had a double measure all these hours.
Hurry home, dearest husband!
Come and kiss me and let us hold one another in that way which God has set aside for us. You are precious to me, more than breath.
Ever thine,
Cynthia
(still your bookend?)
P.S. I know it is a pitiable gesture, but I shall roast something savory for your supper and make your favorite oven-browned potatoes.
Truce?
Bookend—
dooley has delivered your letter and is waiting for me to respond. ii have suffered, you have suffered.
Enough!
You are dear to me beyond measure. That God allowed us to have thiis union at all stuns me daily/
“Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—”
love, timothy—who, barely two years ago, you may recall, vowed to cherish you always, no matter what
Truce. ii will gladly wash the dishes and barnabas will dry.
Out to Canaan, Ch. 16
Once Upon a Time
Writing for Children
Once upon a time, I realized I also wanted to write for children.
My first book for a young audience was about my grandmother, Miss Fannie. Since families are so widely scattered these days, and grandparents and great-grandparents too seldom known or remembered, I wanted to give young readers an elderly woman who was, in a sense, just like themselves.
“Miss Fannie was ninety-nine years old, and very small. In fact, she had grown to be about the same size as she was as a little girl.”