Azalea's Silver Web - Softcover

Peattie, Elia W.; Zimmerhoff, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 154951072X ISBN 13: 9781549510724

Publisher: Independently published, 2017

Carin, dear and far: So you are back at your beloved Vassar! Does it seem as wonderful as it did last year? Or more so? More so, I expect. You were a little lonely and strange last year, you know. But now it will be different. The girls will seem like old friends to you now that you are coming back to them. But, Carin, girl, they cannot possibly be such old friends as I am, or as Annie Laurie is. Don’t dare to like one of them better than you like us. I can imagine, and really spend too much time imagining, just how lovely and cultivated and surprising some of them are. But, please, aren’t some of them quite stupid, too? I hope so. Annie Laurie hopes so. We want still to be the brightest stars in your sky. Lest you should think we are not, we keep polishing ourselves. Annie Laurie, when she is not attending to her dairy, will take university extension work. And I, your own ever adoring, ever grateful Azalea, will keep hammering away at the books that dear Barbara Summers lends, and Keefe O’Connor sends down from New York, and those that your own library at the Shoals furnishes. I have the heart to read, Carin, but not the time. That’s the truth. Or, come to think of it, perhaps it is a matter of eyelids. I have a queer, self-closing pair. If they would stay up after nine o’clock at night I could learn something. But, no, they appear to be attached to a wheel or a ratchet in the clock, and when nine strikes, down they go and down they stay. What can I do? Nothing, except kiss dearest Mother McBirney good night, trying not to yawn in her face as I do it, and after paying my respects to Father McBirney and “brother” Jim, slip away up to my darling loft. Now, there, Carin! You see I’m nicer than your other friends, more unusual and surprising. (You told me the last time I saw you that you liked your friends to be unusual and surprising.) Well, have you any other friend who goes up to her bedroom by means of an outside pair of stairs and who sleeps in a loft, with a tame bat for company? You have not, Carin Carson, and you know it. And, Oh, how I love it! Shall I ever have another room I love so well? The soft noises of the night come purling down into it like a stream. The stars of the northern sky shine into it. The mountain-side is like a green curtain hanging before it. When I get up in that little room, my doors and windows wide to old Mount Tennyson’s whispering side, I seem to find my real self. Everything slips away from me except the night and myself and—and God. Dearest Carin, I am feeling rather serious. It is because of something that I have just come to realize. Do you remember how, at the end of our school-teaching up at Sunset Gap three years ago, your father and mother offered to send me away to school, and I—thanking them more than I could possibly make them understand—refused? I said I wanted it to be Azalea for herself. That I meant to spin my own little web, and that I hoped it would be a silver one. Since then, as you know, I have tried my best. I decided that I would become a teacher of the mountain handicrafts; I hoped that some day when good Mrs. Kitchell resigned her position as head of the Mountain Industries which your father and mother established, that I could take her place. What is more, I wanted to develop the Industries so that they would become much, much more useful and inspiring and important than they are now. I wanted, too, to fit myself to meet all the people who come to Lee—all the charming, gracious people. You know how I have worked for all this. Haystack Thompson, the best basket-maker in the country, has taught me to make baskets. Mrs. Kitchell, the cleverest little weaver of all the weavers, has instructed me in the weaving of woolen and linen and cotton cloth, and in the making of counterpanes, as well as the knotting of fringe and the looping of fancy edges. Mother McBirney has taught me knitting and lace making and crocheting. I can do a little wood carving. I can make mats.

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