This diagnosis proved to be correct and in a few days she was able to sit up, and before I returned to Boston she could walk a little, though she could not lift her feet from the floor.
OUR parting at this time was the most painful moment of my life. I had my work to do in Boston. I could earn nothing out on the plain, so I must go, but I promised it would not be for long. In my heart I determined that the remainder of her life should be freer from care and fuller of joy. I resolved to make a home for her in some more hospitable land, but the cling of her arms to my neck remained with me many days.
She gained slowly, and a year later was able to revisit the scenes of her girlhood in Wisconsin. In two years she was able to go to California with me. She visited the World’s Fair in Chicago, and her sons wheeled her about the grounds as if to say: “Mother, you have pioneered enough; henceforth fold your hands and rest and be happy.”
She entered now upon another joy—the quiet joy of reminiscence, for the old hard days of pioneering on the Iowa prairie grew mellow with remembered sunshine—the storms grew faint and vague. She loved to sit and dream of the past. She loved to recall old faces, and to hear us tell of old times and old neighbors. Beside the glow of her fire she had a keen delight in the soughing of the winds in the grim pines of Wisconsin, the flame of lightning in the cyclonic nights in Iowa, and the howling blasts of stern blizzards on the wide Dakota sod. She came back to old friends in “the Coolly Country of Wisconsin,” and there her sons built a roomy house about her. They put nice rugs under her feet and new silver on her table. It was all on a very humble scale, but it made her eyes misty with happy tears. For eleven years after her first stroke she lived with us in this way—or we with her. And my father, was glad of the shelter and the comfort, for he, too, admitted growing age and joined with his sons in making the wife happy.
