Thursday, August 12th

YESTERDAY a real event. Cathy Beard, who has been writing me for years and sending homemade candies and plum pudding at Christmas but whom I had never seen, came for lunch and a good four hours of talk. When she first wrote, she and John, her husband, were living in Washington, D.C., and now they are on a farm in Vermillion, South Dakota. “My sons,” she says, speaking of her two boys, Felix and Benjamin, a year apart. They adopted Benjamin, a half Black first, deliberately, so that the adopted child would be the only child at the beginning, and a year later they had Felix, their own little boy.

I was eager to hear why they had moved so far away. Cathy told me that after a year in Washington they both felt they must get away from cities, so they looked up various states in the Almanac and chose five that might be possible—five states where there was little immigration, where life would not change radically in their lifetime, where they would not be crowded out. Then John, a lawyer, looked for a job and when one turned up at the University of South Dakota, where he is specializing in agricultural law, that was it—they moved out.

It was good to see this remarkable young woman at last, so much prettier than in the snapshots she had sent, so sure of her values, so wise in the way she and John are planning their lives. She told me she had learned one thing in the month visiting their families in the East, a month is too long away from home! I could feel the tug of that land as she talked about it, her eyes shining, and about the neighbors and friends they have made. I felt the tug too and must somehow get out to see them while the boys are growing up.

I felt when she left that we had had a real exchange on every level, and all so natural and easy because we really know each other well through letters. When something like this visit happens—there have been several this summer—I recognize that, for all my complaints about correspondence, my life has been immensely enriched through all these friends of the work, who end sometimes by becoming friends of my life and I of theirs.