After so long grief, such festivity!

My dear Ms. Brooks,

It is a peaceful New Haven afternoon—a bit sunny even, after what has been undoubtedly the coldest week of this long winter. The rest of the household—Julia appears to be an exception—now slumbers. I write you from the comfort of my crib, where I hide my parchment and quill lest my dear mother and father think it an incredible thing that I should take up a correspondence at what they deem, wrongly, to be a tender age (I’m almost ten months!). My good mother flies nearly out of sorts at my near approaches to crawling; how then will she react to see me, pen in hand, engaged in the epistolary art!

This week has been an unusual one. My honored father took his last exam on Tuesday and returned home flashing a wild grin and merrily clutching an unseemly ambitious stack of books (Fielding, Richardson, Diderot, Voltaire; the good man refuses to be reconciled to his not having been born in the eighteenth century)—his holiday fare before classes start Monday. Since then he’s been haunting about the apartment night and day with no apparent love for industry nor contempt for idleness. He sheds an occasional tear for the troubles of Miss Clarissa Harlowe and lets slip an occasional imprecation against “that vile Lovelace.” It’s endearing, really. Mother finds him maddeningly “under foot,” but Julia and I have been rhapsodic: what amount of novel-reading would we not forgive in a man who abjectly adores us?

While Daddy (you’ll forgive me for naming him familiarly) was taking his last final I was subjected to the biweekly (or so it seems) indignity of being inspected by the no-doubt-well-meaning Tracy from the equally-well-meaning “Birth to Three” organization. Always a nuisance this, but I was determined this time to put a good face on it: a couple of winning smiles and as many slobbery kisses and Tracy was mine. She made some generally positive comments on my progress and was on her way (and none too soon!).

I’ve mastered, at long last, the delicate art of clapping. Mommy (again forgive my familiarity) is in raptures about this (she thinks it surpassingly cute) and is even more euphoric at my performing this act while simultaneously uttering the initial consonant ([k]) of the verb that names it. My other great advance of the week just ended was learning to rear up on my knees, poised for the daring act of crawling. But having assumed this poise I know not, alas, how to proceed. And it’s usually not long before something else, of passing interest, draws my attention and away I roll, not crawl—much to my parents’ chagrin.

Julia has had any number of visitors this week, and she relishes nothing quite so much as being attended upon. On Wednesday our neighbor, Chinah (a young lady from South Korea, two months Julia’s junior), stopped by for an hour or two while Daddy raced down to campus to purchase his textbooks for the next semester. Julia seemed mighty pleased at her young visitor, never allowing a sizeable language barrier to prevent her from issuing orders with a sweetly imperious good will and in rapid succession. Daddy came back just in time for lunch, lugging two sacks full of titles ranging from the bizarre (Animal Liberation) to the banal (Perspectives on Property).

The most momentous social gathering of the week, however, was reserved for Friday, when the best and brightest of the rising generation assembled in our very own parlor for the first installment of the much heralded Joy School. It was one enchanted morning for Julia and her cohorts (Shad and Isaac Turner, Elias Thompson, and Mayah Sevy—Callie LaDuke stayed home with a cold but stands ready to join the happy circle when her health returns). Never was seen so much joy under a single roof: they played with toys, they sat on individualized mats, they learned the rules of the school, they vowed in chorus never to hit nor kick nor push their friends at nursery school, and they divulged the arcane secrets of their favorite foods and activities. But above all things else they experienced joy—torrents and splays and cataracts of untrammeled, unadulterated, ineffable joy. And they sang, merciful Olympus how they sang! (indeed my tender mother has yet to stop singing in the fifty intervening hours). I beheld the spectacle from the commodious throne of my high chair, at first, I own, with the supercilious bemusement of an urbane detachment, but then, at length, the joyful phenomenon proved so infectious that I too found myself within its thralls. Here was happiness; here was mirth; here Hermes and Dionysius linked arms in a union of cheerful discipline; here music and rules met and embraced; here was the Victorian hearth made flesh; here was Joy School!

And it is all to be repeated next Friday. In the aftermath of this communal rapture, we made the most of a more mundane Saturday. Mommy, burdened with a vexingly sore throat, seemed disconsolate that Joy School was adjourned for so many days; to cheer her up, Julia and I conspired to skip our naps (I took a wretched nap in the afternoon so that our altruistic exploit would not be quite so obvious). Mommy made sour faces, but we know that inside she was very pleased. In the evening Kirk and Gretchen Cheney (one of Daddy’s LDS classmates and spouse) joined us for dinner and games. Mommy made a spectacular lasagna, which I enjoyed in its mashed-and-diced incarnation (while on a culinary note, I should point out that earlier in the week Mommy sought to redeem the lima bean fiasco I wrote you of last week with a doubly disastrous lima bean bake this week; Daddy consoled her as he could, noting charitably that in all their years of marriage she has made only four bad meals and that it just so happened that two of them saw the light in the past ten days; charity notwithstanding, he articulated a fairly pointed proscription on the use of lima beans in future gastronomic experiments). The highlight of the games portion of the evening was unquestionably Mommy’s cawing like a raven in an effort to induce Gretchen to pronounce the name of Edgar Allen Poe.

So much for our activities of the last week. You inquire in your last about my affairs of the heart. There are no such affairs, alas, and I begin to despair of ever encountering a gentleman in New England. Certainly there are none here so gallant as the dashing Ezra Bloomfield (did I tell you he had his brother write me while I was ill? Now there’s high regard!). It’s an old but true adage that the men here resemble the weather. But this is an exceedingly dull topic, and I am still young (though less so than my dear parents seem willing to acknowledge!). That this letter finds you in good health, and that it may be followed close upon by your next, is the ardent hope of

Elisabeth Collings