#thomas tryon

The well has been filled in and sown over with grass, but it might just as well have been salt, for all that remains. The outbuildings—the barn itself, the apple cellar beneath, the icehouse, the spring- and carriage-houses, the corncribs, the cider mill, all those are gone. Sad to contemplate; they say I wouldn’t recognize the place today. The Lutherans bought the property and for a time the house served as a church but even that has since been demolished and replaced by a newer, larger building. There is a television antenna on the roof. The bogs have been drained, the meadows subdivided into tracts, and where we used to wade the brooks, streets are now laid out, with light poles, sidewalks, chain-link fences, and two-car garages.

When one's love of the beloved is greater than one's love of life or of one's self, one sometimes prefers death. It is not so much an immolation of the body, I think, of one's physical being as - as an immolation of the heart.

Roseville Beach Reads Tom Tryon