109 East Palace Read Online Free PDF

nature and humanity. It is a deep knowledge of suffering and desolation. It is an intenseness of feeling, of understanding good and evil. Compassion. Vital awareness of being a part of the universe in all its manifestations. Harmony. Acute knowledge of kinship with all the peoples of the earth. Recognition of true values. Preoccupation with truth.
    But even as she wrote those lines, Dorothy knew that she had not escaped the “shadow of death” for long. She had already had a harbinger of the dark days that lay ahead. A year and a half into their marriage, Joe McKibbin was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, a progressive cancer of the lymph system. Unlike tuberculosis, it was then considered incurable. His condition was hopeless from the start, though neither Dorothy nor his doctor ever told him of his terminal illness. His death, when it finally came, was hard and long. Dorothy endeavored to be as strong and steadfast in her husband’s sickness as he had been in hers, and she nursed him over the last painful year to the end. He died on October 27, 1931.
    Before her husband became bedridden, she had taken him on a trip across Colorado to New Mexico, hoping it would improve his health. He had taken to the luminous landscape as quickly as she had and, with his strength already faltering, had agreed that “someday they would settle there where they could have horses and dogs and raise their family under the incredible blue skies and golden sun.” This had always been more her dream than his, and now it was hers alone. “I was ten months old, and she was suddenly on her own,” Kevin reflected years later. “She folded up everything in St. Paul and went down to Kansas City to her parents’ house. She stayed a couple of months, but she couldn’t stand it. In April of 1932, she loaded me up in the little Model A coupe she had and we drove out to Santa Fe.” The trip took almost a month. Although he was too little to understand, Dorothy told Kevin they were going away to a place “where they would sit under a piñon tree and spend all their days in peace and happiness.”
    Dorothy was drawn to Santa Fe as a refuge, and by the memories of her days at Sunmount and of the interesting people she had met there. She had fraternized with a very different sort than she had known in her Kansas City milieu, and those experiences and friendships had awakened a fascination with the region’s unique culture and redemptive climate. Something in the atmosphere, in the strangely beautiful windswept landscape and extravagant purple twilights, encouraged a sense of well-being and possibility. In Santa Fe, there was a ready-made community to welcome her, people who were no strangers to pain and loss, who had gone there to recover and had remained because they had discovered a new way of life. She had felt more alive there, more aware of every breath she took and the feel of the sun on her back, than she ever had been before. “She saw staying in Kansas City as being trapped,” said her nephew Jim Scarritt. “Getting away was liberating.” She seemed to feel as O’Keeffe did when the artist observed of New Mexico, “The world is wide here.” Eager to escape the pitying faces of family, and the suffocating loss of freedom she experienced at being back under her parents’ roof again, Dorothy headed west.
    “I think she may have missed the independence that she had when she was in Santa Fe,” said Kevin. “It was a very creative community and kind of unusual in the way it operated. It had some real characters in it, and everyone went their own way. She felt right at home.”
    When Dorothy arrived in Santa Fe, she found little had changed in the bustling little city at the base of the mountains. Many of the streets lacked paving, the old Spanish women still wore their traditional long black skirts over wide boots, and the familiar, pungent smell of piñon from all the small wood-burning fireplaces in the shops filled the air. Piñon