"Love" and the Historical Society

William Maxwell wrote a short story called "Love".  In it, the speaker, a fifth grade boy, saw his teacher near the end of her fatal illness.   The boy knew that his teacher was buried in the cemetery where "the cinder roads wound" in uncharted branches.  In fact, he knew exactly where she was buried as he admit, in the last sentence of the story, the way he watched an old woman arranging fresh flowers every week above Ms. Brown's grave.

Maxwell is one of my favorite authors, so I suppose I recall his stories often.  And on the second floor of the Historical Society, where cemetery indexes sit on shelves where students once stored their notebooks, "Love" got a new iteration.

I felt Ms. Brown and her adoring students in this room.  Their (figurative) ghosts are writing in cursive an old English rhyme that illustrates possessive pronouns.  Ms. Brown's students look at her trying to understand what makes her so beautiful, wondering if they too might ever be so lovely.  And today at a desk sat the woman who organized the names of teachers and students who might have forgotten, during a time of so much promise, that they too would die.

So, I'm not the boy who yearned for his teacher's company.  I don't know a single name stored in that room.  I am an observer of that space, just as I am a reader of that story.  The convergence of the two might be unclear from what I've written.  I hope that I can more clearly articulate how intense it felt for that room to conjure that story.  Perhaps I can use this feeling, for lack of a better word, to saturate my own writing in its place...what seems to be a goal for our seminar.