The Widow's Lament in Springtime
by William Carlos Williams

Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirty-five years
I lived with my husband.
The plumtree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turn away forgetting.
Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.
 

"The Widow's Lament in Springtime" by William Carlos Williams. (buy now)

On this day in 1791, Vermont became a state. It was the 14th state to join the Union — the first aside from the original 13 colonies.

Since 1856, Vermont voted Republican in every single presidential election except one (in 1964, it voted for Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater). But beginning in 1992, Vermont has voted Democrat in every presidential election. It became the first state to allow and recognize civil unions between same-sex partners in 2000, and was the first state to legalize same-sex marriage legislatively (Massachusetts was the very first state to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004, but it was through a court ruling).

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated on this date in 1933. By the time of his inauguration, the country had been mired in the Great Depression for more than three years. Roosevelt won in a landslide over Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover.

Most Americans didn’t know the extent to which Roosevelt’s paralytic illness had affected him, and he took great pains to keep it that way. In order for him to ascend the steps to the podium to take the oath of office, an elaborate series of wheelchair-accessible ramps was constructed and hidden behind barriers. He walked the last few yards leaning heavily on the arm of his son James, and he made it look easy even though it took great strength.

His inaugural address included the famous phrase “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Frances Perkins took her post as U.S. Secretary of Labor on this date in 1933. She was the first woman to serve on an American president’s cabinet. She had become involved in politics after witnessing the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City in 1911. It was one of the deadliest industrial disasters in American history: nearly 150 garment workers died. Perkins made workplace safety her first political cause, and helped draft many fire regulations that are still followed today. Franklin Roosevelt, who at that time was serving as governor of New York, named her to his Industrial Commission, and he relied heavily on her advice throughout his career.

Oswald Garrison Villard, the editor of The Nation, praised FDR for his choice, predicting that Perkins would prove to be “an angel at the Cabinet in contrast with the sordidness and inhumanity of her predecessors.” But many people, including labor union bosses, opposed the nomination of a woman to the post. Perkins believed men were more amenable to women who reminded them of their mothers, so she dressed modestly and rarely wore makeup. She kept quiet in meetings. She later recalled: “I tried to have as much of a mask as possible. I wanted to give the impression of being a quiet, orderly woman who didn’t buzz-buzz all the time. [...] I knew that a lady interposing an idea into men’s conversation is very unwelcome. I just proceeded on the theory that this was a gentleman’s conversation on the porch of a golf club perhaps. You didn’t butt in with bright ideas.”

Her policies did away with child labor in the United States. They also led the way to the 40-hour workweek, the Federal Labor Standards Act, and Social Security — and they formed a large part of the New Deal.

It’s the birthday of the novelist Khaled Hosseini (books by this author), born in Kabul, Afghanistan (1965). His first novel, The Kite Runner (2003), was a word-of-mouth best-seller, and it has sold millions of copies around the world. In 2007, he published A Thousand Splendid Suns, and it was also an international best-seller. The novel begins in 1975 and continues to the present time. It tells the story of two women in Kabul who are both wives of the same cruel man. His most recent work is Sea Prayer (2018), an illustrated novel inspired by the Syrian refugee crisis.

Khaled Hosseini said: “There is a romantic notion to writing a novel, especially when you are starting it. You are embarking on this incredibly exciting journey, and you’re going to write your first novel, you’re going to write a book. Until you’re about 50 pages into it, and that romance wears off, and then you’re left with a very stark reality of having to write the rest of this thing [...] A lot of 50-page unfinished novels are sitting in a lot of drawers across this country. Well, what it takes at that point is discipline [...] You have to be more stubborn than the manuscript, and you have to punch in and punch out every day, regardless of whether it’s going well, regardless of whether it’s going badly [...] It’s largely an act of perseverance [...] The story really wants to defeat you, and you just have to be more mulish than the story.”

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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