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 Savage Tales of Solomon Kane: The Platypus Reads Part CCLII

I needed a break from A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (too many authors and too many styles coming in too fast) so I decided to turn back to an author whose work I've enjoyed exploring: Robert E. Howard.  This time, however, I decided to skip over Howard's famous Conan yarns and instead take a look at one of his earlier creations, Solomon Kane.  The idea of a puritan occult detective was too intriguing to pass up.  I have the whole collection of Kane's tales and I do intend to blog them all.  Right now, my little literary detour has only encompassed the first two short stories so I'm going to record my thoughts on them right away and get back to the rest as I have time. Skulls in the Stars Solomon Kane makes his debut with this classic bit of English Gothic including a haunted moor, a vengeful ghost, and a solitary miser.   Howard's Kane fits the portrait of the archetypal puritan: grim, principled, metaphysical, with an iron sense of right and wrong.  I h...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (Cont.): The Platypus Reads Part CCLI

Wow, it's hard to read anthologies at anything other than a slow crawl.  The change from author to author and style to style is exhausting.  Slowing down is a good thing, though, if it makes time for reflection.  That seems like one good reason to create an anthology: to force readers to slow down and reflect. With that as a preamble, let's move on to today's selections. The Black Ferris by Ray Badbury I didn't expect to see this Sci-Fi heavy hitter in a Fantasy collection, but there you go.  I've tried to get into Bradbury once or twice and failed.  His Martian Chronicles , in particular, resisted all my best efforts.  This short story, however, worked like a charm.  The sense of atmosphere in particular is masterfully done (a sort of Tom Sawyer strays into Edgar Allan Poe).  My only complaint is that there isn't more of it, but apparently Bradbury already fixed that by expanding the story into Something Wicked This Way Comes. This raise...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Broken Wings: The Platypus Watches Trinity Blood

My questions were not all answered.  That's par for the course when dealing with anime.  Most anime is based on manga.  That means that an immense amount of plot and character development from a 24+ volume series must be condensed into 24 30 minute episodes.  In many cases, the anime is produced before the manga is even finished.  Thus, not having a satisfactory conclusion to an anime series is par for the course.  Most times, I accept this and shrug it off.  In the case of "Trinity Blood," however, I found its incomplete ending oddly fitting.  Let me explain. "Trinity Blood" is chiefly about brokenness.  The ending song with its chorus of "my broken wings" gives it away.  The setting, a post-apocalyptic Europe, gives it away as well.  In fact, every one of the characters in the world of "Trinity Blood" is broken in some way.  We see a young Pope, broken by the political machinations of his older siblings.  We see a y...
1 comment
Read more