Dearest love, up in the aerie now, it's five. In a circumspect, liquidy mood all day, reflecting the weather perhaps, gray, humid and languid. Went about various kitchen chores with ease, one task flowing into the next. Spooned caponata into four large Chinese-soup plastic containers for the freezer, made pesto, roasted chicken, a pan of beets and another of eggplants, cut lengthwise in half, step one for baba ghannoush.

Dutifully finished the Wineapple, and my verdict is that it's worthwhile but uneven. As I mentioned, I think she lacks imagination and emotional distance in describing the affair between Mabel Loomis Todd and Austin Dickinson (Emily's older brother). I am fascinated by the affair, myself. I don't quite have a handle on Mabel, but the Secret Life of E.D. facebook people posted a wonderful photograph today that I'd never seen before, of a pair of adjoining rooms in Mabel and David Todd's house, The Dell. The photo is in black and white, but the rooms are so cheerfully and casually elegantly furnished I realized more palpably than I had after having read hundreds of pages about her, what an artistic and bohemian spirit she was, reflected in a very fresh, original, timeless, organic way in her decorating sensibility. Warmth, spirit, life - wonderful qualities that must have been a technicolor blast of color in what I think of as austere Amherst.

Isn't that the most cheerful, inviting space? Apparently Mabel herself created the decorative artwork on the ceiling, screen, cabinet front, and other items. In reading the Gordon and the Wineapple treatments, it hadn't quite registered on me just how very artistic Mabel was (the fault may lie in me, the reader). But clearly her creativity is front and center for her.

Later in the afternoon I picked up the next in my E.D. summer seminar, a book entitled, A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, & Martin Johnson Heade, by a Mount Holyoke professor of English, Christopher Benfey. I've read the introduction and the epilogue already, and appreciate his incisive, associative, original, take on drawing connections and elucidating grand (& small) themes. Anyway - Mabel Todd figures in Benfey's book, and he seems to get Mabel right, in the way I'm just starting to grasp, introducing her to the reader straight off as "the painter and musician Mabel Loomis Todd." That part is forgotten, ignored, or dismissed usually I find - because today she's remembered as the one who "fell in love with Dickinson's brother, and brought Emily Dickinson's poetry to the world."

The other thing I wonder about is how Emily and Mabel though in such exceedingly close orbit for 13 years managed never once to lay eyes on one another - never meet in person. ED went to pains to avoid her - though given her general reclusiveness, that hardly seems surprising. No - I think they were artistic spirits, though of different temperaments. ED was the "outsider" artist - the one raised to the pantheon of Great Artists, in the end - but that status tends to marginalize other bohemian spirits who have as much right and spirit to make music and sing and paint plates and decorate ceilings and drawer fronts. I'm not implying class snobbery here, just more - well, maybe E.D. recognized more astutely than Mabel ever could (though perhaps Mabel sensed it too) that these were two gases, pure chemicals that could never get along and should absolutely be kept apart for fear of combustibility of an awkward, unpleasant nature. So perhaps it can be said that in her way E.D. was a great psychologist - a Jane Austen in reverse, keeping personages apart who if thrown together at least in temporal life could only jeopardize the peace & happiness that granitized, severe Austin had managed to find in the industrious future secretary (in the very best sense), Mabel Todd...

Very many hugs & kisses for you my dearest. This must be one of your last evenings on the beach. Please, dearest, think of me as you stroll along the shore and regard the waves one last time. That was the river - this is the sea!