Midnight Harvest Read Free

brother, and I find I cannot discuss these matters with my sister, I am appealing to you to read this with the compassion you have always extended to me, and which I am persuaded you must still possess. I hope I have not erred in this conviction, and that I do not intrude upon you in sending you this letter, but I am certain that you are cognizant of all I am presently encountering. You, of all people, must know the weight of mortality, as well as the burden living imposes. How capricious it all seems to me, the twists and turns of events, the bizarre whims of what some would call fate, but I can find no word to express. I thought the Great War had inured me to the uncertainty of life, but now I realize that there is another understanding that is part of age and comes only when one’s contemporaries begin to fall away. In the last two years, my mother has died—which was painful but not unexpected—a childhood friend has succumbed to cancer, and a couple who have been my close friends here have been killed in a terrible automobile accident. Now I am distressed to learn that a longtime associate has suffered a stroke and is bedridden, unable to speak or walk. I went to see him yesterday, and I was shocked and saddened, he was so changed, like an echo of himself. I begin to feel the shadows gathering, as my grandfather used to say. He died in the Influenza Epidemic, early in 1919, when so many others perished. That was a dreadful calamity, coming as it did in the wake of the Great War. How much suffering shaped those years! At the time, I could not mourn for my grandfather, there being so many others dying all around me, and the grief of war still fresh. So I shut it away as best I could and decided that I would not be overwhelmed by the losses I had sustained—as so many others had elected to do, too. Only since the more recent deaths and misfortunes I mentioned have I come to appreciate how much I miss my grandfather, and to understand what I have lost. I begin to wonder if I shall ever reach a point when the mourning is eased, and I begin to suspect that I shall not. If I find myself so haunted by a mere five decades, I cannot imagine how it must be for you.
    Your letters, though few, have been treasured. I regard each one as precious. I apologize again for my long silence, but after the death of your ward, I could think of nothing to say to you that would offer even a modicum of comfort, so I took the coward’s way and said nothing, for which I am most heartily ashamed of myself. It was unconscionable of me to turn away from you in your grief, and I am distressed still that I could not summon up sufficient courage to extend you my sympathy at such a terrible time. You never treated me in any way that deserved such shabby behavior on my part, nor can I offer any explanation for my lacking that doesn’t sound paltry. At the time, I told myself it was the Great War and my father’s death that made it too difficult for me to try to console you, but over time I have realized that I felt inadequate to the task, and yielded to my qualms as a means of sparing myself pain. As I look at this paragraph, my chagrin returns in full force. I hope you can find it within you to forgive me, and that you will permit me to write to you as time goes on.
    Recently I did some watercolor studies of the Golden Gate Bridge. It is being built across the mouth of the bay, a splendid enterprise that changes day by day. You would find it fascinating, I would think. Everyone in the area is excited about it. It will connect the north counties of the bay—Marin and Sonoma most particularly, and the highway that runs into Oregon and Washington—with San Francisco, and allow much of the traffic to travel by road instead of ferry. They say it will be finished in two years, but that seems impossible to me. There is so much more to be done, I cannot see how it can all be accomplished in two years. Nevertheless, it is an awe-inspiring enterprise, no