Victoria A Return to Loveliness

Tea and Gingerbread with 

Emily Dickinson

I was fascinated to learn in the 1990 Victoria that

Emily Dickinson, during her lifetime was not known or noted for her work, but for her gingerbread. Emily would lower a basket filled with her gingerbread from her bedroom window to neighboring children who would wait anticipating their treats.

I was fascinated, what we know about women of different eras come from history books and sometimes from their own words. Emily had a grasp and fascination with life that she translated in poetry. Her works were not published until after her death. Her family found in handmade books bound by Emily volumes of poetry revealing the mind and the heart of the woman.

I wonder about her - what would she think of our life today? I feel a sense of kinship - I understand looking at life and marveling at its beauty and intricacy - oh to have the grasp for words to express the depths of one's heart.

To observers Emily led a singular life rarely leaving her home - but according to a family member, "She herself was of the part of life that is always youth, always magical. She wrote of it as she grew to know it, step by step, discovery by discovery, truth by truth—until time merely became eternity. She was preëminently the discoverer—

eagerly hunting the meaning of it all; this strange world in which she wonderingly found herself,—“A Balboa of house and garden,” surmising what lay beyond the purple horizon.... Her poems reflect this direct relation toward the great realities we have later avoided, covered up, or tried to wipe out; perhaps because were they really so great we become so small in consequence. All truth came to Emily straight from honor to honor unimpaired. She never trafficked with falsehood seriously, never employed a deception in thought or feeling of her own. 

I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors--

Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--

Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise-

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all.

If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.

I would love to be a time traveler - to have the opportunity to meet Emily Dickinson and others such as Jane Austin. Women who have touched our lives over the years by their insight and by their courage to put to paper their deepest thoughts.

Wishing you a very Delightsome day,