dual personalities

I have returned from my brief visit back east. A four hour delay in Baltimore–over two hours waiting on the tarmac inside the plane–put a negative spin to my return yesterday, but I’m back in the saddle. I’ll  have a recap tomorrow.

“Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore.

You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain…you call to all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven’t you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered…there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse

and that sycamore.

You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe.”

He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life.” We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn’t it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don’t know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.”  (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

I think this spring I will plant a sycamore at our camp and hope it grows into something as magnificent long after I have gone.

(pictures of the Persian palace reliefs and ruins at Persepolis from google image; picture of the tree from here)

There was much about love in the ballad: faithful love that refused to abandon its object; love that disaster could not shake; love that, in calamity, waxed fonder, in poverty clung closer.” (Charlotte Bronte, Shirley)

That quote reminds me of my great, great grandmother, Mary Webster Low Sargent (1829-1914), who had a harder life than her nice house in Worcester Massachusetts might lead one to believe. Through it all, Mary remained quietly faithful to her family.

My great, great grandmother (I think), blurry and with reflections

I recently found her will, which says a lot about her. I had to copy it in three parts, so please excuse the awkward photos.

Don’t you think it’s wonderful that she made a bequest to take care of the graves of her mother, father, and grandfather? Her son, our great grandfather, William W. Sargent, does not get a mention because he had predeceased her by about four years (but that’s a post for another time). I didn’t know about the other son, John, or the nieces, so that’s something to look into. I also found a photo of her grave at the Church Street Cemetery in Merrimac, Massachusetts:

Edward and Joseph, who died as children, were news to me! Poor woman had four sons and one daughter and outlived at least three of her children.

Have a good weekend, look into some family history, and be of good cheer, for Spring is coming!