Foreword 1976
A STRONG southwest wind blows across the harbor this morning, whipping the lilac bushes and honeysuckle in front of the cottage and sending the gulls steeply upward when they seem to mean to go down. The masts of the moored sailboats tip and swing, and the gray water flashes with whitecaps. There is no sound but the wind, the crying of the gulls, and, once in a while, the bell buoy, muffled and far away. It is a good morning to write to you, Val, better than the first two mornings I was here, for they were beautiful sunny mornings and I went across the road to the beach and walked with MacDuff. He raced joyfully along, his square muzzle sweeping the sand for new exciting scents. Then he would stop, his gay Scotty tail and pointed ears erect, his nose lifted, every nerve aquiver as he waited for me to catch up with him, when off he would tear again. You know how he does.
Yesterday afternoon I found a quiet place on the sand, out of sight of any house, and sat with my back against a smooth granite rock. You were to have come with me to the Cape, but wonderful things happened to change that, and instead of being here you are with Walt. It was blissful sitting in the sun, looking out toward Nauset Beach across the harbor, thinking of your happiness. He will leave you today, I know, to take up his duties as a minister in Louisiana, and then you will leave for England to study, but you have had a few days with him, and when you are engaged such days are unspeakably precious.
You and I will have four or five weeks together between now and your wedding day eleven months hence, and we will talk, but I know that there will not be time to speak of all we would like to, so I write you these notes.
You know, I’m sure, that the notes come not only out of my own experience of marriage. They come out a lifetime, most of which has been spent single (I have been married, you know, for only a seventh of my life). They come out of being a woman, and seeking to be —single, married, widowed —a woman for God. The attitude with which this effort began is summed up in the prayer of Betty Scott Stam, copied into my Bible and signed when I was ten or eleven years old:
“Lord, I give up all my own plans and purposes, all my own desires and hopes, and accept Thy will for my life. I give myself, my life, my all utterly to Thee to be Thine forever. Fill me and seal me with Thy Holy Spirit. Use me as Thou wilt, send me where Thou wilt, work out Thy whole will in my life at any cost, now and forever.”