![]() ![]() You try to swim in a slanting course, so the experts tell me, and you gain a little distance towards the shore as you stroke not against but across the pull…It is possible to be happy even if one is lacking a mainstream. On her blog, Banks shares the sentences by Taber that helped her in her grief: “Undertows are tricky, so is grief. Banks lost her husband to a car accident, she turned for comfort to Gladys Taber’s book Another Path. I was beginning to wonder if anybody else but me outside the world of Cooper studies had ever read it. She blows my mind when she mentions The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, James Fenimore Cooper’s novel of the earliest days of white settlement in Connecticut. She calls Teale “a modern day Thoreau.” She spices up her pages with quotes from Edna Millay, Rupert Brooke, Walter DeLamere, and even Ezra Pound. In another place in Stillmeadow Daybook, she mentions that she is reading Edwin Way Teale, the nature writer whose house and land we featured in the last issue. When she holds forth on Shakespeare, she does it while she’s hanging blankets on the clothesline. Keats was “Johnny” to her she writes about him like he was her own son. At the same time, she possessed a vast intellect, along with a deep passion for English Romantic poetry. Gladys had the capacity be as simple and down home as any native country person. “This farmer’s stoop, I think, is not from too much heavy work,” she wrote, “but somehow has an overtone of the farmer’s relation to the earth, he and the earth have a kinship and he naturally bends a little toward it.” In the same book, Stillmeadow Daybook, first published in 1955, she tells how “…one day this week there was an unusual commotion as two strange dogs, speaking a strange dialect come down the road and leaned against our fence and made communist statements.” Like Emerson, Thoreau and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gladys Taber has the gift of seeing the miraculous in the ordinary. Gladys Taber has just what our worrisome world needs now. There is enough unpretentious wisdom and deep good humor in her writing to lift the spirits of just about anybody and everybody, from Wall Street to Butcher Hollow. We agree with them that her books should be reissued again. They put out a quarterly newsletter and have a conference once a year. The Friends of Gladys Taber has almost 600 members, women and men, dedicated to keeping her work alive. To this day, with almost all her work out of print, Gladys Taber has some of the most loyal fans in the world. So strong was the hold she had on thousands of readers that after her death in 1980 Harper and Row and several other publishers reissued a number of her Stillmeadow books, accounts of her years at Stillmeadow, a 1690 house on 40 acres that started out as her summer home and became her full time residence for more than two decades. Old houses, I thought, do not belong to people ever, not really, people belong to them.īack in the 80’s there was a revival of interest in the Stillmeadow series of books written in the 50’s and early 60’s by the popular Family Circle columnist Gladys Taber. Home Structural Products & Services, Stairlifts CT Old House, your online source for your old home, period design, antiques and folk art. ![]()
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