Transcription
Juniper Lodge, Chocorua, New Hampshire
July 26, 1925
My dear Miss Cutler,
May I write to you on my most precious possession? It is such a comfort. I think I never had anything from which I derived more real satisfaction and comfort. For years I have wanted one for I had a big machine in college and learned to use it then and learned what a pleasure they are. Then when the portable standard keyboard machines were put on the market I began to covet one but never until this year did I get it. Esther gave it to me for a Christmas and birthday present but she gave it to me the first of the year so I could do all my work on it. Perhaps she thought also that she might get a letter once in a while. I took most of the notes from my reading on it, too. When I went down to the New York Library they gave me a room in which I could type and a boy with a truck to take my books down to the room. Then I came to type me thesis I found that it was so long that the Business College said it would take $30 to pay for having it done for me. Naturally I did it myself and since then I have felt that the typewriter is on the road to being an economy instead of an extravagance!
[Handwritten marginalia: Also I spell and punctuate badly on a typewriter]
There is one thing, though, about letters on a typewrite. That is that they are inclined to be a bit garalous. But then this one means to be a gossipy letter. You see there are so many times a day that some one remarks that she wishes Miss Cutler were here that this letter is meant to say it to you. I am so grateful to be here and to be allowed to stay the extra time. I am afraid it can be only the extra week, though, but then that is very precious. It is a third more than I expected and long since I learned to count life in terms of how much more it was than it might have been. Sometimes I think that all my experiences were worth what they cost if they taught me only that one thing. Actually I think I am a happier person than I was in my youth when nothing shadowed my path beyond the occasional shower when I had planned a picnic! I have seen a lot of the world’s misery and trouble but it has taught me not what a rotten place the world is but how very favored I am. My temperment would not make me a Pollyanna but at least it has changed to a large extent.
We did enjoy Miss Shields so very much. She was such a pleasure to everybody. She made the community life so very happy and also she so gently molded the life to be what she thought it might be. I am especially grateful to living in a place where I could do my summer studying as a matter of course rather than a struggle. I do not mean that my family ever meant to make it hard but inevitably it is hard to study every morning where there is a family life going on with the attendant obligations. Miss Shields did do so much toward making it easy and natural to absent oneself and I do appreciate it. She and Miss Parmelee, too, are so nice about our going to bed too early, too. I feel ashamed so so often be the first one to go but I know that you do intend that we shall enjoy a restful summer as well as a productive summer and there is no place I rest so well as when I am asleep. Ever since I have been here I have slept uncounted hours out of every twenty four. Also I am progressing in my studying. I am trying to acquire that necessary reading knowledge of French when “I have absolutely none on which to begin. I am reading a beginning book. I am undertaking to learn to read it without any grammar. I have heard a good deal of discussion about such a method. Now I am so glad to be conducting a little experiment on the subject. When it is discussed in the future I shall know what I think.
I am living in the room at the left of the staircase with Miss Helen Pierce. Last week we were on the sleeping porch together I enjoy her. You were kind to put us together for I am so glad to know her. She has so many virtues that I cannot count them. She is studying Italien but her efforts are a bit more professional than mine. She gives me an occasional lift over a construction which occurs too often without my understanding it. I am teaching her to make a bed in the hospital fashion. She will reach the end of her lessons in that, though, before I shall have mastered mine!
Hilda Hulbert has gone, now. She was another addition to the household. She is a dear child. She has a really remarkable disposition. I hesitate to use the word disposition for somehow it always sound as though people were born to it and deserve no credit for it. Certainly that is not the case with Hilda. I think I came to know her rather well and certainly I am sure that she understands fully and would have moments of being glad to behave just as badly as possible. She never does; she never complains that she cannot hear; she is never unkind and she never fails to think of the other persons convenience instead of her own whether it is to give up the choice seat by the fire or to wash the extra dishes. I know it is a large order but I think Hilda fills it.
I hope I am going to know Miss Rosendahl before she leaves. That sounds strange but I merely mean that I have liked talking to her and she, too, has the quality of adding to the household but that I have not made a real human connection. I hardly expect to do that in so short a space of time. Yet it is a varied road we travel and if one makes beginnings they often continue as the years go on.
This is the last page I promise you for I know that I have rattled on to great length. I might have told you how much I was enjoying the beauty of the house but after all for it is so likely to be the people who interest me so that was the thing I naturally talked about in the effort to have you see us as we are without you. We would much rather, though, that you were seeing us as we would be with you.
I do enjoy the house, every inch of it and all the little nooks and crannies from the proportions of the living room and the glory of the great window to the lovely blue of the bin which holds the waste! Nor in between do I miss the multitude of details such as the carvings of cranes built into the partition, the Chinese paintings in the hall and on the stairway, the cabinets for wood and the trick seats outside, the piazza which in ceiled only half way so on has the effect of direct sunlight and all the rest which have given you pleasure and which give you pleasure no in memory. I shall always love my memories, too. Thank you.
Affectionately yours,
Katherine Elizabeth Crane
[Letter to Miss Cuttler from Katherine Elizabeth Crane, 1924, Smith College Archives, Buildings Records, Box 219, Juniper Lodge, A – Correspondence.]
