The Day I Met Miss Emily Dickinson

Late yesterday afternoon, I arrived in Amherst, MA, rather by surprise. The maps don't show how much town runs into town here. When I saw the sign "Entering Amherst," I decided to just go on through the town and look around. At the Commons, I turned left, going in the direction of a lot of people on foot who looked like college students. After a few blocks, a car accident forced me to turn right on a totally random street. You can probably imagine my surprise when I drove a couple of blocks and came to a cemetery---the West Cemetery. I knew she was there, and found her I did. The late afternoon sun cast an appropriate gloom. Well, I didn't get in a conversation with her, if that's what you're expecting. I took my pictures and took my leave.

When I left the cemetery, the accident was still blocking the road I came from, so I went on along the street I had been forced to turn down. I passed some homes, a few businesses, a baseball game on a high school field. Many trees lined the road on both sides as I rounded a curve and headed down a slight incline to a cross street stop light. As I sat there, I was going to look to the left to see what was there and where to turn---but a flicker in my peripheral vision on the right, just a quick far-away flash such as someone waving a handkerchief, made me look to the right. And there, sitting on her hill like a demure, genteel lady waiting to be noticed, was the Homestead, the home where Miss Emily lived all but 15 of her 56 years. I think you know---I made the turn.

Surrounding the Homestead, the humid evening air seemed like a misty scarf thrown over the shoulders of the house and into the surrounding grounds. As I drove up the driveway, I instinctively reached to turn the volume down on the radio; even my beloved NPR was not reverent enough for that moment. I wanted to meet her with no distractions. I looked over the house, trying to guess which of the rooms upstairs might have been Emily's. I wondered whether she favored the south or west side of the porch. After finding the museum hours and tours, I reluctantly cast an eye around the hazy grounds behind the house before climbing back in the car and finding a place to settle for a couple of days.

This afternoon, serendipity gifted me again, this time with the tour guide to end all tour guides. Jeanne was/is a literature teacher, and even my college professors couldn't speak with the same authority she had, and as I observed with the people at OSV, she could answer any question along with relevant resources. Miss Emily's family Federal style house was more a factual tour in a few rooms. We learned of her very active social life up until her twenties, her self-consciousness that began to inhibit her life, and the abiding love she had for her sister-in-law Susan, even though Emily didn't visit her brother's home next door for 10 or 15 years. Copies of original manuscripts were barely legible, but no less holy in the moment. She once wrote, in reply to a request for a photograph, that she was "small like the wren," and she didn't exaggerate; a floor-length dress preserved in a case shows the shoulders at about the same level of my elbows. The tour was designed to evoke her image everywhere, and it was easy to feel it. In certain poems, she often has a tone or attitude that seems tongue-in-cheek, like she's laughing behind her hand at her expense, but wondering if we'll get it. I feel as though I do---when Jeanne quoted Emily, saying "I prefer pestilence to a clean house," my jaw dropped because that is exactly how I feel about housework. In short, it was easy to feel her there despite the fact that the house was not preserved in its original condition.

Her brother's house next door, known as the Evergreens, was very remarkable. The succession of people who lived there made virtually no changes before the home became museum property; even artifacts like books and musical instruments were original to the Dickinson family. A scandal was revealed that I've never heard rumors of before: Emily's brother Austin had a love affair with the woman who became her first biographer, Mabel Loomis Todd. It was an open secret, and they weren't much concerned with appearances. Another "scandal" evolved later with Jane's niece Martha, who, after her divorce from a Russian diplomat, took in a young man who was working with her. She said he was "too young to marry, and too old to adopt." So she moved him into the house with her, where he lived as her "companion." In fact, I believe Jeanne said Martha willed the house to him, although her mother wanted the place taken apart down to the foundation, probably because of the bitter years of his affairs with Mabel Todd.

And that's how I finally, finally met Miss Emily Dickinson. She wasn't nearly as shy as the legends portray her. Maybe she'll even come along tomorrow on the garden walk.