Moving the Mountain

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A cotton quilt was heavier but not so warm as a woolen blanket. Homespun sheets were durable, doubtless, but not comfortable. The bathing to be done in a small steep-sided china basin, with water poured from a pitcher the outlines of which were more concave than convex, was laborious and unsatisfying.

The relish of that "hog and hominy" and the beaten biscuit, the corn pone, the molasses and pork gravy of my youth, wore off as the same viands reappeared on the table from day to day and week to week, and seemed ceaselessly present within me.

It was pleasant to listen to Aunt Dorcas's gentle reminiscences of the past years, of my father and mother in their youth, of my infancy, and Drusilla's. She grieved that she had not more to tell. "I never was one to visit much," she said.

But it was saddening to find that the dear old lady could talk of absolutely nothing else. In all her sixty-eight years she had known nothing else; her father's home and her husband's, alike in their contents and in their labors, her own domestic limitations, and those of her neighbors, and her church paper—taken for forty years, and arbitrarily discontinued by Uncle Jake because it had grown too liberal.

"It never seemed over-liberal to me," she said softly, "and I do miss it. I wouldn't a'believed 'Id a'missed anything so much. It used to come every week, and I kept more acquainted with what the rest of this circuit was doing. But your Uncle Jake is so set against liberalism!"

I turned to my cousin for some wider exchange of thoughts, and strove with all the remembered arts of my youth, and all the recently acquired wisdom of my present years, to win her confidence.

It was difficult at first. She was shy with the dumb shyness of an animal; not like a wild animal, frankly curious, not like a hunted animal, which runs away and hides, but like an animal in a menagerie, a sullen, hopeless timidity, due to long restriction. Life had slipped by her, all of it, as far as she knew. She had been an "old maid" for twenty-five years—they call them that in these mountains if they are not married at twenty. Her father's domineering ways had discouraged most of the few young men she had known, and he had ruthlessly driven away the only one who came near enough to be dismissed.

Then it was only the housework, and caring for her mother as she grew older. The one pleasure of her own she ever had was in her flowers. She had transplanted wild ones, had now and then been given "a slip" by remote neighbors—in past years; and those carefully nurtured blossoms were all that brought color and sweetness into her gray life.

She did not complain. For a long time I could not get her to talk to me at all about herself, and when she did it was without hope or protest. She had practically no education—only a few years in a country school in childhood, and almost no reading, writing, conversation, any sort of knowledge of the life of the world about her.

And here she lived, meek, patient, helpless, with neither complaint nor desire, endlessly working to make comfortable the parents who must some day leave her alone—to what?