Update from Lake Woebegone

Well. The tides of illness, malaria, black death (you get the picture) are receding. Each day ends with a slightly less exhausted Christy than did the day previous. I'm not all better yet; my throat is still too sore to make eating pleasant, and it's hard to get to sleep some nights because of the pain, but each morning finds the old trachea a little less inflamed.

This is good because school, by comparison, is just ramping up. My basic assignments are beginning to be haunted by the spectres of recitation, DQ, book report, and paper. To augment this evil, Brittainy and I have discovered a new "secret place." It is a graveyard.

Now, don't accuse me of morbidity. This really is the most charming graveyard that ever was, and if you have read your Anne, you ought to know that graveyards are the special and appropriate haunt of college girls. This graveyard is very old, with stones dating back to the early 1800's. It is also small, but not too small, and completely surrounded by towering cypresses. Within, there is rest for the soul, if not the final rest of death, yet the complete rest of a sacred place. The hydrangeas bloom there, and the bees husband them, and moss grows around great twisted roots of guardian trees. Brittainy and I were there all afternoon, with our Bibles and our notes of encouragement that we were writing to various friends.

"It's strange," I said, as we rambled through an opening in the old, low stone wall with our picnic lunches. "I don't feel disrespectful at all. I feel as if I'm coming to pay a visit."
"Yes." Brittainy agreed.

We speak low in the graveyard, but we laugh, too. If someone asked me to sing and dance there, I would do so, and feel it in no way inappropriate. I found a stone with an inscription, asking the reader to leave the deceased alone "with my rest and God," but to leave "beautiful flowers," which deceased had loved in life. I went to pick a hydrangea bloom, and left it there, and thought (for deceased was nameless) that whoever lay beneath would have been a kindred spirit. It is the same all through the place--I cannot touch them, therefore they are left to their rest; but I can and do leave beautiful flowers, snatches of songs, gentle touches to clear away grass. And if I recline beside a headstone to read my book, it is a friendly companionship, for as they are now, I shall be someday, and if I would teach myself not to fear death, I must not fear the place of the dead.

So I have made friends with all of them, and gone round to read many names, and will presently have learnt all. I love Little Helen, for example. She was two months old when death came for her, but her headstone says, "Little Helen," so her parents must have loved and wanted her. The Browns are the oldest family there, I think, but the Nichols are pretty high up too. For all the closed-in feeling of the place, it is so sunny and quiet that it might be Lewis' Wood Between the Worlds at a pinch. I tread softly, but out of friendship, not fright. I feel a great tenderness for all the sleeping souls, and long to know how many of them died in hope of Heaven, and whether they were happy in life. Sometimes I sit and stare for five minutes together at a headstone, as if trying to make its age-cracks and pitted face tell me all my questions' answers. They never do. But I don't mind.