by Joan W. Blos
Can it be some hymn once sung, imprinted on my infant sense although not comprehended? Where come such words? From my own self? Glad, although not unafraid, I am determined to obey, believing that only the form of instruction is mysterious.
Friday, February 3, 1832
Heavy snow. Knitted all afternoon.
Sabbath
Snow again. Could not go out.
Tuesday, February 7, 1832
We expect the breaking out—it will be the first for Dan’l, the second time for me! ’Tis hard to think he was not here—no, nor even known to us, to share the last occasion!
Thursday, March 8, 1832
I am to leave at daybreak and can not sleep tonight. Thus I have stolen down the stairs—their every, rough edge known to me—to sit by a single candle’s light with this, my companion, my journal. I wonder if it is common to feel that never is a place so loved as when one has to leave it?
There, near the door, my two trunks wait and folded atop them is my travelling cloak; also the novel Northwood by Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale. This is a gift to me, from Mammann. She ordered it from Boston. Father made much of the weight of my luggage and said that anyway he believed I would be home by Summer.
Yet now is the night still, dark, and cold. The fire has long since turned to ash with only the back log glowing. In the next room lie Father and Mammann while in the loft above me Dan’l dreams his farmboy dreams and Matty—I have no doubt of it!—allows herself excursion in to my half of the bed. The very thought recalls me!
Good night dear place, dear house, dear all—good night, and now good-bye.
Providence, R. I.
December 9, 1899
My very dear Catherine,
I am so grateful for your letter, and glad to know you enjoyed the journal I kept when a girl.
You ask about the run-away slave, he who was certainly not a phantom but a real tho’ tiny part of what was happening every where then, and what was going to come. I never heard from him again, tho’ some times, indeed for years and years, I used to imagine what I would do were there a knock upon the door and there he was: Curtis. He never came, of course.
Joshua Nelson stayed on as a farmer. Two of his boys went off to fight in the War between the States. One, the younger boy I think, got killed at Gettysburg. Then Josh signed up to take his place and got wounded pretty bad. It never healed the way it should, him not being young at the time. He died a couple of years ago. We exchanged Christmas cards right up to the end.
All of the others are gone now too—except for me and Little Willie Shipman. I still think of him that way although the last I heard of him someone was making a party, him turning 75!
No, I didn’t forget to tell! We had no presents at Christmas—then, nor at birthdays either. The first J saw a Christmas tree must have been in Boston and I was about 23.
Well, I am going on 83 now but not about to quit There are too many things I know about where I want to me what happens. You, my dear, being one of them, and this new century starting.
Do what you can to make it good. And remember, as we used to my, that life is like a pudding: it takes both the salt and the sugar to make a really good one.
Lovingly, your great-grandmother,
Catherine Onesti
P.S. Thank you for telling me about the chair, that it is not worn too badly. After Mammann and Father died it went to my sister Matty. Matty never had children, though, and her husband died before her. So when she passed on, it came back to me, and I, having no use for it then, gave it to your mother. You were very clever to have figured that out.
C.H.O.
Author’s Note
A few miles north of Meredith, New Hampshire, a blacktop road cuts off to the left, and if it ever had a name no one uses it now. After gently climbing for a mile or more, it passes the site upon which stood the farm I have called the Shipmans’. Here a dirt road enters from the right and, traveling north for a few hundred yards, arrives at the house and bam, both restored, where the story takes place.
How much of it is true? I started with a handful of facts, an amateur’s interest in the history of the region, and the intention to reconstruct life as it was when the house was new. To do this I worked with documents and books and newspapers of the region, visited museums and small collections, and even explored old graveyards in search of further clues. Some of the journal’s episodes are freely adapted from sources consulted, among them the teacher’s bodily ouster and the Count of Meredith’s surprising and stylish return. But little by little the figures I imagined became more real than the rest.
One August afternoon, when I had been working on the story for some hours, I wandered into the living room—cool, dark, and familiar. There I had the distinct impression that I had somehow intruded, in time as well as in place. The house belonged, as it always would, to the people who had built it. The Catherines and Cassies, whatever their true names, had never really left. I had only filled in the story. And that is the truth.
J.W.B.
March 1979
Aladdin Paperbacks
An imprint of Simon & Schuster
Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 1979 by Joan Blos
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
First Aladdin Paperbacks edition 1982
Second Aladdin Paperbacks edition 1990
Also available in a hardcover edition from Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blos, Joan W.
A gathering of days : a New England girl’s journal, 1830–32 : a novel/by Joan W. Blos.—1st Aladdin Books ed.
p. cm.
Summary: The journal of a fourteen-year-old girl, kept the last year she lived on the family farm, records daily events in her small New Hampshire town, her father’s remarriage, and the death of her best friend.
ISBN 0-689-71419-X
ISBN 978-1-4424-9669-9 (eBook)
[1. Diaries—Fiction. 2. New Hampshire—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.B6237Gat 1990 [Fic]—dc20 90-32 CIP AC
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