On arrival, we went directly to Ashantee to visit Nelka's Aunt Martha, who had been quite ill for sometime after a car accident. We arrived on a Saturday. The next Tuesday Aunt Martha died. This was again a terrible shock for Nelka. Once again death had struck suddenly and this time her last close relative was gone. Both Aunt Susie and Uncle Herbert had died without Nelka being with them and now Aunt Martha dies only three days after we had returned.
Aunt Martha left Ashantee to Nelka and her cousin Lutie Van Horn. So unexpectedly we found ourselves here and remained. At first we thought that we would sell the property but the depression was on and it was not possible to do so.
Thus we stayed and stayed. I did some farming and we still had the remnants of her aunt's horse business, but these were difficult years for us.
I think that while this prolonged stay might have been difficult and materially complicated, this time was not wasted, as Nelka pointed out, from a moral point of view. It was a time of consolidation of our points of view, of our beliefs and conceptions.
And so we stayed here from 1934 until today, and until Nelka passed away in December 1963—a long stay of close to thirty years.
Nelka had had a very varied, very diversified and unusual life. A life which was one of highly emotional feelings. I think characteristic of Nelka was her highly emotional expression of loyalty and devotion, an emotion, which dominated most of her life and all of her actions.
Anything she did or undertook was primarily motivated by emotion rather than by reason, but once decided upon she carried out her actions with great determination and great will power.
Her first overwhelming emotional feeling was a patriotic nationalistic feeling for Russia, and a mystic devotion to the person of the Emperor and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Then her next emotional feeling was the attachment and deep loyalty for her family and her kin.
But in Russia she had no relatives and all her family was American. Because of that there seemed always to be a conflict of feelings, attachments and loyalties, a conflict which dominated a great part of her life, at least the first part of it. I think in many respects this conflict of feelings was upsetting and painful and she suffered a great deal from the frustrations that these feelings often brought about.