I write this not in the room where I wrote most of Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage in my beautiful Pines but in a Single Room Occupancy hotel in San Francisco. Hattie is with me and her daughter. I haven’t been feeling so well, lots of swelling of my ankles and my kidneys tiring. Very annoying. Robert is in Spokane or maybe Klamath Falls or back east. He’ll join us for Christmas, I’m sure. He writes that he has a plan to buy The Pines back. We’ll see. I have my scrapbook with photos of that home, my horses, our trip to Europe. I love showing it to any who will listen. It brings me joy to look at these memories. I have had my time there, a glorious time, but home is where family gathers and where love blossoms even in a desert.
Willis and Oscar have visited their “mother,” which pleases me to no end and if I’m well enough next spring, Hattie and I will travel to Clatsop Beach in Oregon and the boys will join us. Our rooms here are of a much better quality than the one we shared in Boston all those years ago, and Daisy loves the settee. And certainly, my sleeping room excels over the stage stops of my earlier days. After all, it’s a hotel suitable for a lady and her housedog, without the presence of twenty-six western men. My chunk of ore reminding me of what I’m capable of sits beside my bed. In our many moves, I lost the crocheted bird, our marriage favor. Like a good Presbyterian, I have seen my way clear to supporting Robert in whatever his endeavors have been. But I’ll support my own desires as well. I write a little, even sold an article to the San Francisco Chronicle, a travel piece for young ladies about how to keep their decorum in the western climes but to still allow themselves to have a grand life and as much exhilaration as comes from riding out front in a steam engine’s cowcatcher. I’ve added a few suggestions about the importance of staying in the happy lane.
We have a splendid view—when the fog lifts—as I’m sure it will. It always does.
Carrie Adell Green Strahorn, 1922