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Show 118 MADELYN CANNON STEWART SILVER On July 26, Madelyn and Harold packed to go to the ranch, her first stay there with the baby. Harold left them in the day time and ultimately spent the weekdays in Ogden and went to the ranch for each weekend. Madelyn's first few days at the ranch were soul-filling but different than in any other years. As she wrote: These first four days here were filled with a most peculiar melancholy. It was so difficult to adjust to my baby's pres ence, and the necessary restraint. I felt terrible not to be able ride, and I seemed to be working all the time. And, too, I foolishly tried to keep the family from doing anything with the baby for fear of spoiling her and imposing on them. I missed Harold horribly and everything seemed wrong. I tried to wheel Elizabeth over to the swimming hole, the ground became a whole series of mountains and valleys. (Madelyn, who enjoyed swimming, had her "first real swim since the baby's arrival" on August 4, 1930, three months after Elizabeth's birth.) Aunt Annie came to my rescue and kept her while I went swimming, and I had an hour of finding myself, thanks to the bath and the sun bath on the tarpaulin. To express my feelings I thought up something about my old dreams having mounted the sky and plunged into the blue but I can't really remember it now. One evening at the beaver dams helped, too. Anyway I always bump my head against a stone wall I approach before I learn how to leap it. But thank Heaven I always.learn." to She added, in a letter to Harold the same day, that she had always had contempt for women who didn't love the out-of doors, the woods, and the wide-open spaces-who didn't love these more than almost anything else. In the months following the birth, Madelyn's diary entries feature, almost daily, an expression of delight with Elizabeth and a similar expression of gratitude and love for Harold. They had visitors almost every day, sometimes for meals and some "26 times overnight. Madelyn's strength was not back to normal; her complaints were only that she was weary. She slept a lot. |
