Saturday, September 6th

WHERE TO BEGIN? I ask myself each day. I do the chores slowly, try to start out at least on a good steady slow rhythm. Today got up at 6:30 to a subdued autumnal light, the sun diffused through gentle clouds and haze. I changed the sheets on my bed and got the laundry together, then went down and cooked my breakfast—a good one of bacon and some of the small tomatoes Raymond brought yesterday from his garden. (My mother loved this breakfast and I always think of her when I cook it.) Then I went out in rubber boots over my pajamas and picked a few flowers to perk up the bunches. A great joy now, because it’s the first time I have sowed them among the annuals, is the scabiosa, every shade of white, purple, and lavendar, and also the annual lupine. Yesterday I picked two sprays of that, the most astonishing brilliant blue. Any day now we shall have a hard frost and it will all go.

Susan Garrett called yesterday to ask whether I would like to see some gardens that afternoon, and off we went at half past three with two young women who had kindly wanted to do this for me because they liked my books. It was a delightful expedition, to three gardens, each very different from the other. Mrs. Howells at Kittery Point gave us two night-blooming cereus to watch open after we got home (and they did open at precisely nine—a poignant glory because it comes and goes so fast). I enjoyed the gardens and the delightful women who created them, but my hackles rise always at the attitudes of garden club members. I fear I am unregenerate, or perhaps simply old-fashioned, for I do not really like “arrangements” where too often a kind of ingenuity (using strange leaves or lettuce or a cabbage to be “interesting”) replaces the simple joys of just plain old-fashioned bunches of flowers, which is what I love. I was pleased to note that nowhere did I see such a variety of annuals as I have in my wild, untidy, weedful picking garden here.

Today young Charles Barber from Ohio comes for lunch. He is on his way to study in England. I do look forward to showing him my habitat, as we met in a strange house (though lovely) when I was out at Ohio Wesleyan.

So much for the surface of life these past days. But always in the back of my consciousness is terrible woe and anxiety about the death of the spirit in our inner cities. I was grateful to find a moving account about this by Joshua Resnek, a sportswriter from Lynn on the Op-ed page of the Times yesterday. He described a drive through the worst of Brooklyn.

“We passed row after row of gutted tenements and street upon street of decaying buildings. Each time we looked at a face it was black and there weren’t any smiles, not anywhere. The most noticeable expression was one of a stonelike quality; the steel-fisted, hardened gaze of a people who have, with great difficulty, given up.” And later he says, “The black people we saw in Brooklyn are living in Hell. The system that accommodated the first generation of immigrants and that assimilated the second during the last fifty years is not, today, equipped to perform the moral task of dispensing equality.

“There is no equality of mind or the spirit, or of the soul in this place. No lingering sense of satisfactions over anything. Not birth. Not the living of life. Not death.”