Tuesday, January 28th

IT IS a queer winter, with a few warm days followed by cold, a few rainy days, then snow, and one can never settle down to good old winter! The crocuses are up … fatal!

Yesterday I had three letters from three friends, so different in every way that it was startling to find the same problem making for depression. One is a young married woman with two small children and a husband who is a company man. She feels shut out by his work, resents his cavalier way of bringing “friends,” meaning clients, home without warning, but especially their lack of communication because there is never time. He is also away a lot on business. The second is a friend whose husband retired recently; on his retirement they moved away from the town where they had always lived to be near the ocean. He is at a loose end and she feels caught, angry and depressed without being able to define why. The third is a woman professor, quite young, who lives happily with a woman colleague but speaks of her “bone loneliness.”

“Loneliness” for me is associated with love relationships. We are lonely when there is not perfect communion. In solitude one can achieve a good relationship with oneself. It struck me forcibly that I could never speak of “bone loneliness” now, though I have certainly experienced it when I was in love. And I feel sure that that poignant phrase would have described my mother often.