Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt:
We’re in the Madeleine L’Engle memoir section. Next book is:
The Summer of the Great-Grandmother
Madeleine L’Engle has four books out in a series that she calls The Crosswicks Journal, and The Summer of the Great-Grandmother is Part 2 of that series. Crosswicks is her house in Connecticut. This book is about the summer that Madeleine took care of her mother, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s. It’s a very sad book – but also redemptive and inspirational, too.
Here is the opening of this book:
EXCERPT FROM The Summer of the Great-Grandmother
This is the summer of the great-grandmother, more her summer than any other summer. This is the summer after her ninetieth birthday, the summer of the swift descent.
Once, when I was around twelve, we took a twenty-mile toboggan ride down a Swiss mountainside. The men guiding the toboggan were experienced mountaineers; the accelerating speed was wildly exciting. Mother and I both clutched the sides of the toboggan as we careened around sharply banked curves. The guides could keep it on the hard-packed snow of the path, but they could not stop it in its descent. My mother’s plunge into senility reminds me of that toboggan ride.
When I look at the long green and gold days of this summer, the beautiful days are probably more beautiful, and the horrible days more horrible, than in actuality. But there’s no denying that it’s a summer of extremes.
It might be said with some justification that all our summers are summers of extremes, because when the larger family gathers together we are a group of opinionated, noisily articulate, varied and variable beings. It is fortunate for us all that Crosswicks is a largish two-hundred-and-some-year-old farmhouse; even so, when four generations worth of strong-willed people assemble under one roof, the joints of the house seem to creak in an effort to expand. If we all strive toward moderation, it is beccause we, like the ancient Greeks, are natively immoderate.
This is our fourth four-generation summer. Four Junes ago Mother’s namesake and first great-grandchild, Madeleine, was born. We call her Lena, to avoid confusion in this house of Madeleines. Charlotte, the second great-granddaughter, was born fourteen months later. My mother is very proud of being the Great-grandmother.
But she is hardly the gentle little old lady who sits by the fireside and knits. My knowledge of her is limited by my own chronology; I was not around for nearly forty years of her life, and her pre-motherhood existetnce was exotic and adventurous; in the days before planes she traveled by camel and donkey; she strode casually through a world which is gone and which I will never see except through her eyes. The woman I have experienced only as loving and gentle mother has, for the past several years, been revealing new and demanding facets. When she wants something she makes her desires known in no uncertain terms, and she’s not above using her cane as a weapon. She gathers puppies and kittens into her lap; she likes her bourbon before dinner; she’s a witty raconteur; and the extraordinary thing about her descent into senility is that there are occasionaly wild, brilliant flashes which reveal more of my mother-Madeleine than I ever knew when she was simply my mother.
But she is my mother; there is this indisputable, biological fact which blocks my attempt at objectivity. I love her, and the change in her changes me, too.
