Skip to main content

The Dead and Beautiful Rest (Cont.): Platypus Travels Part LXIV

Aunt Mary's Grave

We all look for role models.  Sometimes we find them in a parent.  Other times it's an uncle or an aunt.  Jane DeForest Shelton, author of The Saltbox House, found her's in Marietta Smith, "Aunt Mary" for short.

Aunt Mary's mother, the beautiful and vivacious Glory-Anah Shelton, had been the talk of the town in her day.  She'd made a good, if belated, match in merchant James Smith.  Smith's connections brought Glory-Anah a stone house across the water in Derby and an imported China tea-set that was a nine-day wonder.  A sick mother brought both the Smiths back to the old Saltbox house in the White Hills of Huntington and Glory-Anah never really wanted to move back.  Her husband died and there she sat and aged with only her daughter, Marietta, to care for her.  Marietta, or "Aunt Mary", had one chance to get out that came in the form or a certain Southern gentleman.  The prospects for a happy marriage were strong, but when the young man returned home to make his fortune he fell ill and died.  So Mary swore off marriage and stayed by her mother's side until Glory-Anah passed away leaving her daughter a sizable fortune.  For the remainder of her life, Aunt Mary traveled staying at all the right places and meeting all the right people during the right seasons returning each year to the old house in Huntington.  There it seems she often took the younger scions of the family under her wing.  This was how Jane DeForest came to know her, the wise, feisty, and independent old lady who was always willing to lend an ear to someone who needed it.  When Aunt Mary died, they buried her next to her mother in the grand cemetery in Derby.  The family home, built by Daniel Shelton in the late 1600s fell into ruin.  Nothing of it now remains.

In the Resurrection, they will be like the angels in Heaven: neither marrying nor being given in marriage
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...
15 comments
Read more

SNES as Money Well Spent: Platypus Nostalgia

I got my Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was eleven years old.  That's a couple years after it first came out.  The occasion was a little dramatic: to celebrate the end of a two-and-a-half year course of treatment for cancer.  I had no idea that it would be waiting for me at home after the final doctors visit.  It was a nice spring day, the trees were waving gently in the breeze outside the bay windows.  With a cup of tea resting on the coffee table, I set down to play.  What was that first game?  It was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past .  Around twenty years later, my SNES still works as does that Zelda cartridge.  It's been a long way from boyhood in Southern Connecticut to manhood in North Houston, but I'm still playing. Why am I still playing?  There were stretches when I didn't.  Many times, I've just been too busy.  There were also seasons when it felt embarrassing to still be playing video games....
10 comments
Read more

Under the Moon: The Platypus Reads Part LXVI

My wife and I were discussing our favorite books from the Chronicles of Narnia on our way back from lunch.  My wife, true to her sunny personality, is a staunch fan of "The Voyage of the Dawntreader."  I can't argue with that choice but, when push comes to shove, "The Silver Chair" has always been my favorite. I have a bit of a theory.  I think "The Voyage of the Dawntreader" is Lewis' grail legend.  If that's so, then I'd hazard a guess and say that "The Silver Chair" is his "Pilgrim's Progress." -just think about the shape of Puddleglum's hat and the fact that he lives in the Fen Country and you'll see what got me thinking down this line. That brings me to why I like "The Silver Chair" so much.  When I was little, we had a children's version of "Pilgrim's Progress" that my mom used to read to me.  I lived in New England and the Christianity I was raised with had a heavy tin...
7 comments
Read more