May 28 would be my first appointment with the surgeon after leaving the hospital May 12. I hoped to be allowed to drive. On May 23, Jane’s birthday, I was working and napping, napping and working—when the phone rang from Yale–New Haven Hospital. My mother had stopped breathing and turned blue in the emergency room, having used her failing breath to dial 911 and whisper her address. A tube breathed for her now; it looked as if she would survive. Immediately, we began to calculate. If she had been dying we would have gone to her. If she were not dying, we would gather our strength (and Dr. Sutton’s permission) to drive to Connecticut the day before the hospital released her, to bring her home and set her up again to live alone, if she could, because living alone in her own house is her remaining life’s passion.

The next day in the morning the telephone rang again. Andrew delivered the news that Natalie had given birth to Peter, fifth grandchild and first male, large and redheaded like his father.

Dr. Sutton allowed me to drive. Yale–New Haven kept my mother until June 1. On Sunday, May 31, we drove to Connecticut by way of Abigail in Concord, New Hampshire, and Peter in Belmont, Massachusetts—Jane and I driving by turns—and the next morning we brought my mother back to the house on Ardmore Street, and mother and I traded respirator-stories. I brought her news of great-grandchildren, especially the new advent of a boy destined to be coddled by four elder sisters and first cousins. Home again and happy, my mother worked like crazy—paying bills in the morning, arranging her new medicines after lunch, in the afternoon preparing and cooking string beans the way she loves them. We would stay a week, and go home on Monday, the eighth of June.

This morning I began a new longish poem called “The Daughters of Edward D. Boit” as I sat tired and sore in the Ardmore Street house where we moved when I was seven in 1936, and where I wrote my first poem in 1940. The poem gives off a posthumous odor.

On the one hand there was the rhyme that told us that women’s work was never done. On the other hand, in mid-nineteenth-century industrial and imperialist England, Charles Kingsley wrote, “For men must work, and women must weep.” He wrote as neurasthenia became epidemic among middle-class Victorian females.

As everyone knows, in the last decade or so American families have come to require a double income—and it is the norm for women to work at regular jobs outside the house. It is assumed by right-wing defenders of family values that women never worked as they work now. Although the present circumstances of women’s work differ from the old conditions, women have almost always worked: For most social classes, the era of forced leisure for women was brief, insofar as it existed, and in all the history of men’s brutality to women, men have never punished women so much as when—in city and suburb, at different historical moments according to social class, from the eighteenth century into the twentieth—men removed from women the necessity or convention of work equal in quantity and importance to men’s work.