Softly Slippered Animal Spirits

In recent months, I have been engaged in some collaborative house-sitting at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s House in Hartford, Connecticut. Harriet herself is on extended vacation. She occasionally drops us a line from afar, in her fashion, phantastically.

To my surprise, I discovered that she can be wicked good fun, as her neighbors will attest. This one, for instance, a fellow next door named Samuel Clemens. In his autobiography he recounts that Harriet would come into his house “at her own free will, and as she was always softly slippered and generally full of animal spirits, she was able to deal in surprises, and she liked to do it.” When least expected, “she would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war-whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes.”

In today’s American world, such sweet-slippered animal spirits expressed in old age would no doubt be handled with the Chain known as “Memory Care.”

©John P. O’Grady