“Spring is like a perhaps hand in the window,” e e cummings wrote, and while I can never literally explain what he meant—what line of poetry can be literally explained?—the line always comes to mind when I see the first hints that spring will eventually be here, even in the mountains of northern New Mexico: a bud encrusted with snow, a nest that will soon be used, the first leaves of the daffodil bulbs I planted last fall.

“Hope is a thing with feathers,” another favorite line of mine—who knows the author?—stands for this time of year; snow showers, gales, melting snow, ice, and the Sangre de Cristo mountains still deep in fifty inches, and crowned, so often, with the thick clouds of another storm.

As the snows begin to recede here in the southern Rockies, the descansos by the sides of our roads come back into view. These are shrines created by families who have lost someone in a car wreck at that spot.

Made up of artificial flowers and wooden crosses with names written on them, they often sport tiny American flags. Since the names are mainly Hispanic, it surprises me that at a time, and in a usually tolerant state, where the legislature is debating changing a long standing law allowing “illegal immigrants” to get drivers’ licenses, in a country with a long history of hatred of minorities (not minorities, here), these family tributes reinforce their traditional allegiance to a country that has done so little for them, and acts now with increasing violence against them—i.e., ICE swooping down on schools to access the status of the children’s parents, often snatching away people who have been working here for many years, dividing families, and plunging these “illegals” into months-long detention at a hellish jail in the southern part of the state.

And these are people who have committed no crime other than that of crossing our shared border.

New Mexican natives fight in all our wars. A large percentage of the battalion that suffered through the Bataan Death March was from this state. And they fly the US flag, even on the roadside shrines that bring to mind so many family tragedies.

Still, we pick at them, trying to drive them out, in spite of all the proof of their enormous importance to our economy, in spite of appeals to mutual understanding. I’m reminded of my chicken-raising days, years ago in Kentucky.

I acquired my first chicks when I was ten, ordering them from a breeder. They arrived, cheeping loudly, in a cardboard box. I was excited, and frightened; they were tiny, incredibly delicate and vulnerable, and they needed care. With great care, and corresponding pride, I raised most of them until they became the pride of my little barnyard, Rhode Island Reds and Leghorns strutting the dirt, with the curious cooing sounds hens make when they aren’t celebrating their laying.

There were of course problems: one of my two feisty roosters developed something called Bumble Foot, a large swelling on his foot. My father in one of our rare moments of intimacy helped me to operate on the swelling with a kitchen knife. The rooster recovered, angrily.

But there was one hen who was not so lucky. For some reason I couldn’t decipher, she began to loose feathers on her neck. In all other ways, she seemed healthy and happy, picking about the yard with her sisters.

But then her sisters turned on her.

As soon as they saw the bare spot on her neck, they began picking at it with increasing viciousness. Soon she was nearly bald, sore, and suffering. The outcome was inevitable; I had no way of fencing her off by herself. And when I discovered, one morning, her pitiful limp and nearly featherless body, I imagined the other hens were triumphant.

They had done away with the different one.

I’ve had the miserable experience at several times in my life of seeing the wounded among us picked to death. There seems to be something in human nature that can’t abide difference, that sees, or exaggerates, threat in what may be illness, deformity, or simply an exception from the “normality” we all expect.. When our urge to pick someone to death is aroused by the sight of a vulnerable patch of psychic bare skin, we go at it as relentlessly as my hens.

I can only find a hint of hope in my faith—perhaps the same faith that allows my neighbors, so often derided and attacked, to mount crosses and fly little American flags on their wayside shrines.

Or
Buy Yourself Something For Valentine’s Day

Whitney Houston’s death last Saturday alerted me to a part of her story: the roles played in her rise to fame by her mother, Cissy Houston, a gospel and pop singer who sang back up to Aretha Franklin, whose triumphant hymns to women’s independence heralded my political coming of age. Aretha was Whitney’s godmother.

This matriarchy, source of strength and grace, is rarely recognized as such. It’s reconstructed, in a far different culture, in the story of the Santa Clara Pueblo painter, Margarete Bagshaw, whose transcendent exhibit at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture here in Santa Fe pays explicit tribute to her mother, painter Helen Hardin, and her grandmother, the artist, Pablito Velarde—who was told by the boys at the Indian School here that she should go home and bake bread.

In one of Bagshaw’s enormous, brilliant canvases, three robed katchinas, their powerful iconic masks centered by round mouths that seem to be singing, or shouting, represent Bagshaw towering between her mother and grandmother, sharing their power and their skill.

Yet in my Anglo family, as in many others I know, the link between grandmother, mother and daughter, or daughter-in-law, is frail to the point of disappearance.

I believe this is because in certain white, middle and upper-class families, we women are repeating the lesson learned over the centuries of our disempowerment: that our very survival depends on men.

Of course this is no longer literally true, as women begin to dominate, numerically, in advanced education and even make progress toward the top in some of the professions and in politics.

But the fear, and the faith, remain: a man will always have a paycheck—a faith that should have been severely undermined by the current recession—and will afford us various kinds of protection based on his presumably larger size and strength.

I see this fear and this faith repeated in the Valentine Day’s advertisements which feature a man buying a piece of jewelry or a box of chocolates for a woman, leading me to wonder whether we women ever buy such baubles for ourselves.

I also see this every day in the way we pair: younger brides with older grooms (even when the groom is old enough to be out of the question entirely); taller husbands with shorter wives; the woman hiking a mountain trail here, always behind her man.

Whether the men in question are able, or willing, to provide what we expect them to provide is of course open to debate. But in any case, we cannot hope for powerful women artists until we reclaim our matriarchal lineage, including memories like Margarete Bagshaw’s, of a childhood where meals didn’t appear on time and the house was a mess.

Bad mothering, anyone?

The other kind of matriarchy—and there are many kinds—is represented for me in the house here called informally The House of the Three Wise Women, built and maintained by three generations of women collectors and painters, supported by a large fortune, generated by the great-grandfather but ably augmented over the years by his daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter.

The house, supported in part by the foundation these women established, is to become an international center for women scholars and independent researchers in the three areas these women supported: business, the arts, and conservation.

The idea is barely born, and it will be years before the center is funded and begins to extend its possibilities beyond a small group of grant recipients.

But the very existence of the house itself, a treasury of early twentieth century Hispanic and Anglo art, is a living example of the kind of creation which three generations of women who share a vision can bring into existence.

But of course they hired other women to take care of the childrearing.

Sitting long hours in the classroom arouses in me the restlessness that was the bane, or perhaps the blessing of my childhood: when will I be let out? Eventually the discussion catches my attention, but first there is the longing for the open road that I first encountered, in fiction, in Kenneth Grahame’s delicious The Wind in the Willows.

My favorite character, the beloved hero of my childhood fantasies, was—and is—Mr. Toad, the unrepentant rebel whose escapades in his motor car scandalize his animal friends.

Mole and Rat encounter their irrepressible friend during a peaceful walk: “…far behind them they heard a faint warning hum, like the drone of a distant bee. Glancing back, they saw a small cloud of dust advancing on them at incredible speed, while from out of the dust a faint “Poop-poop” wailed like an uneasy animal in pain…with a blast of wind and a whirl of sound that made them jump for the nearest ditch, it was on them! “Poop-poop” rang with a brazen shout in their ears, they had a moment’s glimpse of an interior of glittering plate-glass and rich morocco, and the magnificent motor car, immense, breath-snatching, passionate, with its pilot (Mr. Toad) tense and clutching the wheel, possessed all the earth and air for a fraction of a second, flung an enveloping cloud of dust that blinded and enwrapped them utterly, and then dwindled to a speck in the far distance, changed back into a droning bee once more.”

Appalled, Mole, Rat and their friend Badger decide to take Toad into custody: “We’ll teach him to be a sensible Toad!”

“You knew it must come to this, sooner or later,” the Badger warned severely. “You’ve disregarded all the warnings we’ve given you, you’ve gone on squandering the money your father left you, and you’re getting us animals a bad name in the district by your furious driving and your smashes and your rows with the police. Independence is all very well, but we animals never allow our friends to make fools of themselves beyond a certain limit, and that limit you’ve reached.”

The animals imprison Toad in his own house, acting as guards. Asked to repent, Toad says, “a little sullenly, but stoutly, “I’m NOT sorry. And it wasn’t folly at all! It was simply glorious!”—and soon escapes confinement.

What a wonderful role model Mr. Toad was, and is, for me—especially in the dreary confines of a classroom, where I’m tempted to shout in the midst of endless nit-picking about Aristotle’s definitions of luck and chance, “I faithfully promise that the very first motor car I see, poop-poop! Off I go in it!”

Best New Ending Wins a Signed Copy of Mending: New and Selected Stories

I’m opening this up to you, my readers— write your own ending to the following short story and submit it via my contact form before March 1. I’ll pick my favorite and the winner will also be published on this page. Good luck! — Sallie

I’ve lived in the mountains for a long time, gotten the knack of it. Every morning down the hill by eight to catch a ride, if I’m lucky, with some guy going to work in Santa Fe. Always a young guy alone in a beat-up car, maybe driving in for breakfast from the campground.

I dress the part: long cowboy coat, big hat, broke-down boots, the hat and coat the last things I bought with a regular wage. That was nine years ago. What’s underneath don’t matter as long as it’s clean; I keep the coat buttoned. No bags. Bags make people nervous, like maybe there’s contraband, or booze, or you’re planning to steal.

If he’s talky—the driver—I tell him it’s my birthday, or I haven’t eaten in three days. Sometimes in cold weather when the tourists are gone, that last is the truth, and the first is the truth once a year, but that’s the one day I never mention it.

I’m clean. That’s essential. At the camp—tarpaulins and a teepee back in the arroyo—we bucket up water from the Little Tesuque till it freezes or dries. We sponge off with that, wash what we have to. With this drought, the creek dried up in June, but they let me shower, usually, at the public recreation center at the bottom of the hill. Not too often, though. In between I depend on those baby wipes.

I can’t smell. That’s rule number one, when you depend on the public for transportation.

Nothing on my breath, either, but that’s no problem now.

So when the kid in the back seat turned up her nose at me, I knew it wasn’t because of my stink.

She was sitting back there when I got in, riding shotgun next to her mother. First woman to stop for me in three years. I don’t blame them. They have reason to be scared, or else they have their purses and shopping bags on the front seat and don’t want to move them. Or a dog. A dog is the worst, sitting up on the seat next to the woman like the ride was made for him.

Eight am or a few minutes past, the last day of June. No school to tote the kid to, so where were they going? Those kind of people don’t drive to town for breakfast.

I thanked her when I got in and looked over my shoulder at the little blond in the back seat.

Maybe twelve, with a sour look. She made the ride even more unlikely. I don’t have much experience with mothers—mine lit out before I remember—but I’ve noticed they guard their litter like tigers. Or tigresses. Picking up a hitch-hiker, western get-up or not, on a lonely mountain road is not what a cub-carrying tigress would normally do.

The atmosphere in that car was thick as cream, but rancid. I saw I was supposed to provide some kind of an excuse, for a fight or more likely to avoid one.

The car gave the woman away more than how she looked, decent, ordinary, in those workout clothes. The car was a German make, solid, clean as a button, but not new, the kind of car tigresses believe is safe, but held onto for longer than I would have expected. The houses in these mountains cost in the millions. Those folks usually change their cars every year.

So in a bad way, maybe? Scared enough to use a homeless man to pad whatever was going on with her daughter?

Maybe already running out of other tricks; she was no looker, this woman. Forty, I guessed, but the desert air makes them look old before their time: wrinkles, and the backs of her hands on the steering wheel were spotted.

On second glance, I could see she’d been pretty some time back. That blond, sweet look that dries up, fast.

She looked at me. Still the eyes of a pretty woman who can count on men wanting her, at least some of the time; blue eyes, with that flash in them. The kid had them, too.

She asked me how I was doing.

I told her the usual, but without the birthday or the three days without food.

She didn’t leave it there. She asked me more questions than I wanted: why I don’t go to the shelter when everybody in town gives it money to take care of people like me (she didn’t say bums). Why I don’t look for laboring work with all the construction around here, how long I’ve been sleeping out.

Most people don’t bother with all that. The answers are always the same: stealing at the shelter, no construction work with the downturn, nine years this Christmas when my last squeeze chased me out.

That’s when the kid in the back seat decided to open her mouth.

“He’s a beggar, Mom,” she said.

Her mom shot back, “Don’t say that, Cissy.” Her voice had a caw in it, like a raven’s.

“I’ve heard worse,” I said, not to give the shrimp the satisfaction.

“Dad’s going to be furious when he hears.” She leaned her sharp little chin on the back of the front seat and turned those blue eyes on me. “Wait till I tell him.”

“You’re not going to tell him.” There was the caw again and those spotted hands strangling the steering wheel.

“Yes, I am.”

Mom glanced sideways at her with that flash. The tigress had met her match.

“You always try to find some way to stop me talking,” the kid went on, like she was giving a sermon in some church. “It never does work.”

“I stop you when you’re rude. When you start cursing.”

I started feeling for the woman. There’s nothing worse than letting a kid get you down.

“Did you know there are no swear words in Indian?” I asked.

They didn’t hear me.

“It’s so lame to fight me about clothes,” the kid said, changing her tactics. Now she sounded as old and weary as her mother. “I don’t know why you do it.”

“Because I won’t let you leave the house looking like —-.”

“Ooh. Ooh,” the kid said, putting her hands to her mouth. Square hands with chipped green polish. “You almost said a bad word.”

“I said what you looked like this morning.” Her voice evened out. She was getting back some of her own. Maybe. “I wont drive you in town looking like that. I won’t have you hanging out on the plaza all day with your skirt that short.”

The girl jeered. “What do you think is going to happen?”

“Oh, honestly.” Mom looked at me, wanting help.

I pulled out what I could. “We all do things when we’re young we regret later.”

“Like being a drunk tramp,” the brat said. I didn’t fall for that.

The mom tried to shut her up. “Now, that’s enough!”

Now the kid figured she’d get me on her side.

Fifteen years ago, when I first encountered Plato’s teachings at St. John’s College here, I railed against them. My mother used to call this, “Kicking against the pricks,” no pun intended.

Today I’m beginning to realize that this curriculum, based on the Great Books, a system devised in the 1940’s to encompass the whole of a gentleman’s essential library, reveals the base—the stones—on which we all stand.

Like the base of one of Euclid’s equilateral quadrangles (we get into this next), the Great Books share a common base with much of western thought.

So, no railing, this time, but an earnest attempt to learn.

The railing didn’t lead anywhere. When I mentioned all those years ago to a pleasant librarian at St. John’s the absence of books by women in that beautiful building, she graciously suggested that I give her a list. A while later, I noticed a short shelf set up by the entrance, holding perhaps twelve titles, labeled BOOKS BY WOMEN.

Sometimes you can’t win for losing.

Wiser, if sadder, now, I will dive in and see what these stones are made of, what layers of intellectualization, habit, custom and just plain fear harden them even as we walk thoughtlessly across them by day by day.

These stones lead in certain directions.

Today, in our blessed little capitol city, our state legislature is debating a bill that would further restrict access to abortion. For years I’ve been puzzled by the stony persistence of this effort, across the country, Logical arguments, such as Plato might have devised—our state has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the nation—fall on deaf ears; the new answer is to provide state money for classes for “Young Parents”—the often absent fathers perhaps included.

A persistent, hallowed notion, an article of faith, one of the Eternal Verities, is at stake here: the superiority of males depends on their control of females. Otherwise, the whole edifice cracks and begins to crumble.

I don’t think pious reminders about the sacredness of all life really figure in this fight, other than as window dressing. After all, no one who is opposed to choice seems to care about the fate of the fetuses they want to preserve.

Aside from control of women, another deeply buried belief, rooted in Plato, figures here: the innate superiority of men. All aspects of this being are sacred, certainly including his sperm. Refusing to allow his sperm to develop into what might well be his likeness deprives him of power, which passes to the innately inferior female, whose judgement in this matter is suspect. And so the eternal fight against choice.

I don’t mean to imply that only men assert their threatened power here. Women who feel their power flows from men—and in terms of this culture, it does—are sometimes the most vigorous crusaders against choice.

All these arguments are ancient, out of date, like Plato’s bodiless heads, and dubious for that reason, yet silent, bone-deep belief in female inferiority still cements the stones under our feet.

Plato would be amazed, and delighted, if he knew how long his lessons have survived, and in what hallowed halls they are still taught.

I’m trying, with a good deal of anxiety, to put together what I know and believe with the suppositions and proofs of the ancient Greek philosophers. They use a language and a way of thinking, totally abstract—almost—that is as foreign to me as the abstruse calculations each member of my class must write, from memory, on the blackboard.

After an initial collapse of confidence, I am determined; these same ancient Greeks formed my mother’s thinking and attitudes, which profoundly influenced my growing up. So in coming to terms with these ideas, I am, again, coming to terms with the complex woman who to a great extent formed me.

Now, as I launch with trepidation into my third semester in the graduate institute at St. John’s College here in Santa Fe—it will produce, at the end of another semester, a Masters in Liberal Studies—I begin to sense, beyond and through my frustration, the looming presence of my mother and her mother and grandmother, all of whom believed in what they called THE ETERNAL VERITIES.

What exactly these were, they never explained. But I know from many references that the Greeks were at the root.

First, we read Plato’s dialogue, or rather, monologue, Timaeus; this invented man gives a long account, unchecked by the listening Socrates, of the creation of the universe, centuries before the invention of scientific tools or of Biblical representations.

Timaeus’ elaborate preamble seems to prove that, for some men and perhaps now some women, the way things are dims in importance compared to a theory of how they came to be. His analysis, assumed to be objective, trumps subjective observation.

Timaeus’ Athens depended on slaves, as did my grandmother’s genteel antebellum Richmond. In both cases, women, slaves or not, were deemed to be inferior; so a thinking man must find a theory to explain what his own observation might have taught him was not women’s innate inferiority but their lack of education and opportunity.

Before such a conflict can erupt, here comes Timaeus, conveniently, explaining that the demiurge, a sort of god, announced when he molded clay into human beings that “The superior kind was that which subsequently would come to be called “male”.

(A footnote adds comfortingly, “It was usual in ancient Greece for the male to be considered superior.”)

Furthermore, a male who led an immoral life would return in his next incarnation as a woman. If she did no better, she could expect to come back as an animal, perhaps a dog.

Now remember: these teachings have formed the basis for what we consider advanced education here in the west for the past two thousand years.

To my astonishment, none of the bright women, young and older, in my class raised the issue of Timaeus’ assumption. Nor did I. To comfort myself, I tried to believe that we all knew his assumption fell into the same absurd category as his theory of why the world has no hands or feet—because it doesn’t need to grasp anything or walk anywhere—or of human beings, who sport bodies so their heads won’t roll into ditches and get stuck there.

But even if I assume that now, I have no reason to assume that for the past two thousand years, all readers or hearers of these sentiments have dismissed them as absurd, especially since during most of those centuries, Timaeus’ assumption would have been simply a commonplace (maybe not the rolling heads.)

To be continued…

What a pleasure it is to see, in the midst of disheartening news about the low number of women writers whose writing appears in major national periodicals, that the Atlantic is at least at the top of the list.

It’s a particular pleasure to me because the Atlantic—then called the Atlantic Monthly—gave me a boost when I started my life as a writer.

A favorable review of my first collection of short stories, and publication of two stories I was writing then, was the most exciting thing that could happen to me during the two years after I graduated from college.

I was not yet grown-up enough to be able to express my thanks adequately to the editors; it is late, now, to be thanking them since they are no longer around.

But on behalf of all the women writers who struggle, as we do, to find acceptance in the closed world of East Coast literary life, I want to thank them now, and to encourage all of you who are looking for a little hope in this bleak world to write and thank them as well—and maybe send them something they might publish.

Our heartfelt attempts at cheer and goodwill this holiday season bark their knees—if they had knees—on reports like Name It. Change It. Just when we wanted to forget all about misogyny comes this portent reminder that it is always with us, especially in the various forms of media I attempt to ignore but which bathe our country in a bath of vitriol.

How tragic it is that all these years after the resurgence of the women’s movement in the 1970’s (and it had hardly lain dormant before that), we are still shy about naming the discrimination we see on every hand! How many of us have silently witnessed drunken jibes, this season, oblivious comments (all professionals are still assumed to be he’s), compliments on our looks or clothes that carry condescension or even threat like a sting in their long sinuous tails? Surely even those young women who insist that “all that” is a thing of the past have felt uncomfortable under the scrutiny of men in malls, streets, subways, or have noticed as soon as they enter the job market that they are still second class citizens, last hired, first fired, still making a miserable 77 cents to the dollar paid to men. And I suspect that, as domestic abuse increases and is blamed on the misery of men out of work, women who retain their jobs will be blamed not only for continuing to work—robbing a good man who is only trying to support his family!—but also for causing the increase in assaults and battery.

Yet naming it, in silence, while a worthwhile first step, is only a private act. We are called on, now, to name it in public: to question progressive movements like the various Occupy groups that shove women to the sidelines (how often have you heard a woman interviewed from those encampments?), liberal politicians whose most important asset is their wives, philandering candidates who espouse something filmy called Family Values.

Letters to the Editor: yes.

Speaking out during social occasions when we will be met by a wall of silence, inappropriate joking, or worse.

Constant, bone-wearying attempts to support women candidates—but only those who openly oppose the system they are trying to enter: a contradiction in terms.

Well-meaning philanthropy that treats poor women as colonized subjects who should be grateful for our help.

Daughters and granddaughters growing up in blissful ignorance (and this applies particularly to the privileged, fenced about with gates, private schools, resort vacations, first class travel, hired help, and a society that endorses, applauds and admires privilege in all its forms), even when addressing these topics in the perhaps-listening presence of beloved girls raises hackles and creates divisions—

IS ALL THIS TOO MUCH TO ASK?

NOT WHEN WE SPEAK, AND ACT, TOGETHER.

Now that my newest book, Mending: New and Selected Short Stories is reaching its readers, I find myself in a rather delightful quandary: Sarabande Books will publish my next book, The Blue Box, a family narrative based on the letters and papers of three of my foremothers, in August, 2014—which seems a lifetime away. As I debate turning my energies in another direction (The Blue Box is virtually finished), I am intrigued by the life of Doris Duke, whose papers have just been opened to the public as part of the Rubenstein Library at Duke University.

I have always been intrigued by the life of this woman, who is usually described only in terms of her money and her real or imaginary escapades. She is emblematic of the way “rich women” are treated in this culture, with a powerful mixture of prurience and disapproval; one biography is called, simply, Too Rich, and others are scandalous potboilers. Yet anyone who listens to NPR knows at least one important use she made, through her foundation, of her inherited money, supporting conservation programs long before they became fashionable.

And I met her.

I was a young bride in Paris on my honeymoon, a silent guest at a formal luncheon where severe-looking French– speaking men and women ignored me. At the head of the table, a woman—DD—who seemed unbelievably old, wielded an authority that startled me. She had no consort, as far as I could tell; she did not hesitate to orchestrate her guests, turning from one to the other, asking questions, soliciting opinions. She ignored me; I had nothing at that point to offer. She frightened me, but at the same time, her unquestioned authority excited me. She unlike any woman I had ever encountered.

Many years passed. Eighteen years ago DD died, leaving her enormous foundation to continue her work.

When I visited Duke a few months ago, a small display of material from the DD archives (she is often referred to as DD at Duke) was in the library lobby. I was fascinated by old black and white footage of a young woman in a white dress, dancing with other young women in white dresses on a lawn. Grace, insouciance, pleasure in living—how do these attributes fit with, or contradict, the heavy aura of scandal?

A few weeks ago, a reporter for the New York Times wrote with relish of a dispute in Newport, where DD did much important work, restoring, salvaging, creating the Historic Newport Foundation. Now, a monument designed by Maya Lin “Splits Newport’s Old Guard”, according to the report.

The monument, in Queen Anne Square, created when DD cleared some derelict buildings, sometimes directing the bulldozer drivers herself, has caused an uproar, pitting ancient people who actually knew her against one another, some wishing a monument that points to the future, rather than the past, others decrying it as “ersatz history” they claim the “relentless pragmatic Mrs. Duke would have hated”. (The Times, titling her Mrs, seems to believe that DD was married to her own father.)

This is, for me, the opening note in what will certainly be several years of looking through an enormous archive, finding not what suits my preconceptions—and of course I will try to have no preconceptions!—but material that may show the enormous complexity of a woman who not only transformed Newport but left two other exceptional houses, one in New Jersey and one in Hawaii, and an enormous foundation, all to promote her vision.

I’m certain that DD had a vision. No woman encumbered with the prejudices of the early twentieth century could have worked in the public realm without one. For me, her vision is necessarily a mystery, like the grace and insouciance of the young woman in white dancing on the grass in a long passed and forgotten summer.

I will follow the course of my discoveries here, beginning with my first days in the archive at Duke next spring.