Tuesday, December 10th

IT HAS BEEN unseasonably warm for the last few days … and today again, a romantic sunrise, clouds edged in crimson just before the sun rose between two banks of soft gray. Now at half past nine the sea is that ineffably calm satin blue and the clouds have vanished. Purity and peace.

I am going to Nelson and to Wellesley over three nights at the end of this week, and haven’t paused to write because it’s a great rush to get all the presents packed and ready for the Nelson neighbors. I have baked about twenty dozen cookies, six different kinds, in the last three days. I burned half the first batch—awful! But then I began to achieve confidence and all went well. What fun it is to fill the boxes, and to feel more or less ready at last.

I have meant to record that by chance I have had two moving evocations of my mother lately. When I read poems at Westbrook College in Portland, a charming middle-aged woman at the reception came to tell me that she had had my mother as teacher of applied design at Winsor School. She said they all looked forward to those afternoons as such fun and what a great teacher my mother had been. They made simple geometric designs painted in brilliant colors on ice cream boxes and wooden bowls; the results were beautiful and various. Here again is proof that giving a child a form to play with releases something—an unfashionable view these days. Yet space has to be defined in some way in every art, it seems to me.

The other evocation of EMS was a letter from Alice Ekern, who was a neighbor in the apartment house at 10 Avon Street where we lived in the first years in Cambridge. She had just read my piece in House and Garden where I speak of mother’s making me such exquisite clothes for my dolls each Christmas and reminded me of a white silk smocked dress that had been mine and that mother gave Alice for her little daughter. “And,” the letter tells me, “my Babs still assembles every Christmas the Belgian crèche, the little handmade animals and house. As she assembles this, as I did before Babs, each piece is a felt blessing.”

Soon I shall start again a book of portraits that I’ve been accumulating over the past years—one is a portrait of my mother. Perhaps at last I am ready to write it again. I have always abandoned it in despair, I think because in some ways my mother was a tragic figure; yet what she communicated to all who knew her was pure joy, and that was her particular genius. But how to make it clear?