Free After the Stroke by May Sarton Page A

normal.
    A perfect summer day here—the ocean absolutely calm, that Fra Angelico blue with a lighter band all along the horizon.
    It was good to see Huldah after more than a year, looking just the same, although her deafness is a problem. But we had a really good “catching up” talk, nevertheless.
    When we came back here there was a tiny exquisite mouse sitting on the rug in the porch—Pierrot was out. I screamed for help and Huldah, after several tries, managed to capture it in a paper towel and took it far off in the garden, near Bramble’s tombstone. Pierrot must have brought it in alive earlier on. Will it live after such trauma?
    I love mice but it is the sudden motions, the fear of picking it up, that scares me so. I was awfully grateful for Huldah’s help.
    She is very good—in Brentwood, Tennessee, too—about feeding household scraps to wild animals and told me she is now feeding a small fox and has seen him. I have not seen a fox here for a long time. There is so much building going on, the wilderness, here as everywhere, is literally losing ground. There are fewer birds also, no grosbeak this year at the feeder.

Friday, July 25
    I lay in Dr. Petrovich’s office in a johnny for forty-five minutes yesterday afternoon, waiting and crying with fear and tension. He finally got there. I said firmly, “I have two possibilities, the operation or suicide, for I can’t go on feeling so ill, unable to work.” He still asked if I had not felt better since Tuesday—when the heart began a normal beat—but Tuesday was the worst day for nausea in a long time. Then, the bombshell, “They may refuse to do the operation if your heart is normal when you go on August third. They are academics,” he said, “you have to realize that.” So I go in to Boston on August third and may be sent right back here! It is so preposterous after this long agonized wait that the only thing to do is curl up inside and sit it out.

Monday, July 28
    Where have the days since Friday gone? Very depressing, foggy, humid awful weather for one reason, plus the fact that I feel worse rather than better and have a dull pain in my heart all the time—worse nausea than before. But Saturday morning I had the great joy of seeing Susan Garrett who came with strawberries to sit down and catch up a little, especially on my problems lately. She is such a sensitive, compassionate person. How I wish she were still director of the hospital here! But of course George is a professor at Charlottesville and they are here to inhabit her father’s dear old house on the river only for a few summer days. Seeing Susan was like an infusion of love and caring. “A piqüre ,” Edith Kennedy used to call that.
    That afternoon Royce and Frances for champagne—and in all the heavy heat there came a saving waft of air from the ocean and we sat outside for a while, then inside, for some reason got off on a passionate political argument, and I felt ill when they left after only a little more than an hour and could not eat anything. That meant that Pierrot and Tamas had a feast—the half-cold tenderloin steak!
    Yesterday I again felt too sick to look forward to the real event of Eleanor Blair’s coming with Elyce, bringing our lunch. I haven’t been able to get over to Eleanor since before Christmas. What a joy to see her, blooming at ninety-one, having recovered from a broken wrist in record time, and lit up by Elyce’s presence as she always is. Elyce teaches economics at the University of Indiana—where I’m supposed to be October 13–18, God willing—and knows Eleanor because she was her tenant on an exchange year at Wellesley. It has turned into a remarkable friendship.
    She had made a fruit salad and a special yogurt and mango sauce—and luckily I had put a bottle of Vouvray in the fridge which tasted perfect with the fruit and the Brie.
    I was amazed at how