Homeland Read Online Free PDF

themselves. I will drop this letter into the post-box at Lufkin’s store, for Will Kydd to take across to Belfast on his mail-run Monday.
    You may always say what is in your mind to me, Susanna—anything you wish. As I hope I may, to you, should I ever chance to do anything as outrageous as yourself.
    Your friend always,
Cora
    Cora Poole, Southeast Harbor
Deer Isle, Maine
To
Susanna Ashford, Nashville Female
Academy
Nashville, Tennessee
W EDNESDAY , N OVEMBER 27, 1861
L ATE NIGHT
    Dearest Susanna,
    The thought of you in Nashville—smiling and politely nodding while all around you rabid Secessionists shout their heads off—is the only thing that lets me breathe a little easily tonight. I trust that further meetings of the Southeast Harbor Ladies Reading Circle will go better!
T UESDAY , D ECEMBER 10
    Your letter came. Oh, my darling, I will take the liberty of disregarding your first request, and will pray for your brother Payne! For both of your brothers! And for yourself. I hope things go more easily for you now?
    Another snowstorm last week. The house and barn are but dimpled mountains of snow. Even during daylight hours the house is dark, for the sun rises well past eight and is vanished by four. We keep the wood-box filled, prepare our simple meals and eat them, endeavor in vain to keep the house clean of soot. With the hired man gone, Oliver works very hard keeping the cows fed and the barn clean and fresh. The cows are nearly dry, so there is no butter to be made, only salted from the cellar, and last fall’s eggs taste of brine. As the well is frozen hard, Ollie scoops up buckets of snow, to melt in the kitchen for our use and that of the animals. In the evenings weknit or sew, while Ollie sharpens tools and mends snowshoes and harness, and keeps the brass polished. He and Mother take turns reading to us from the Bible. I sometimes read the Portland newspaper, but much of what it contains is diatribes about Southern cowardice and degeneracy. Like you with
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, I
know
this is not accurate!
    I took the precaution of purchasing material before I left Boston, for clothing for Little-Miss-Fidgets or Little-Master-Fidgets. Fabric is always dearly expensive on the island, the more so now that the Confederate sea-raiders are burning coastwise shipping. Peggie confided to Mother last night that she suspects she may be with child herself. Ollie walks around with a dazzled look on his face that is almost comical.
    Mother reads, and we sew, and the banked spruce-boughs clogged with snow almost muffle the shrieking of the wind.
F RIDAY , D ECEMBER 13
    And now it is for me to confess shocking, shameful, and outrageous behavior.
    A storm again, darkening even the windows of the attic where I sit in what used to be Peggie’s tiny room. I have brought up a lamp with me, and this end of the attic, above the kitchen and close by its chimney, is comfortably warm. Yesterday Elinor visited, to ask me to speak at the Ladies Reading Group. “The women need to hear you,” she told me. “You need not let shame keep you silent. For the good of the Union, Cora, you must speak out about how you truly feel towards this traitor who has tricked and deserted you. You must show the other women that you are one of
us.”
    I replied, “I am not ashamed. Emory made his choice. That does not alter either my love for him, or my loyalty to the Union. Have you not always been first to champion a woman’s right to hold viewsthat differ from her husband’s?” But Elinor was profoundly shocked at my disloyalty. In the end I gave a half-promise to speak, but her embrace upon departure left me feeling more alone than ever.
    I do not wish to dwindle into one of those people who is forever complaining, “In the City we did so-and-so … Back home it is like this …” Yet when I woke last night to the muffled howl of the new storm outside, I felt such a longing for Boston, with its lectures, its newspapers, its concerts, and its