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Botolph, Wednesday May 7, 1681
On the day before we left with Joshua in his cart, I hurried to finish my chores.
I checked the supplies in the larder to make sure there’d be enough butter and eggs, beef and poultry – milk, cheese, bread – to feed the boarders for a week so Ralph wouldn’t have to look for provisions right away. I try to make things easy for my son, because he’s always been absent-minded and more so since the death of his father, which came not directly from a war injury, but because days on end out of doors in the cruelest time of the year made him susceptible to illness. As a result, he succumbed to pleurisy, which a stronger man might have resisted.
I closed the larder door and gazed out the window. The sunlight on the harbor seemed as yellow as lemon, as brilliant as a field of marigolds. I imagined a rainbow of fragrances – lavender, lilac, witch hazel, hawthorn – that used to please me when I was a youngster.
I visited Deputy Governor Drayton early in the afternoon. People like me, a child of the first pioneers to Sagadac, don’t usually become friendly with representatives of the royal government for the same reason that we’ve stopped making friends with natives: we don’t know what they’ll think of us. I decided after my husband Cyrus died, however, to break through some of the restrictions we put on ourselves.
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