Chickens, Gin, and a Maine Friendship by E. B. White & EDMUND WARE SMITH

Author:E. B. White & EDMUND WARE SMITH
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Down East Books
Published: 2020-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Yrs.,

Whitey

P.S. I do not need to earn money any more, as my oldest grandson has a paper route.

January 18, 1962

Dear Whitey:

Yours of yesterday saying you will do the piece on the role small boats and the sea have played in your life got me so far off the tenderhooks that I telephoned my Managing Editor in Dearborn, Robert Martin Hodesh, to report the great news and get glory. Of course, “What’s For Me in the Sea” was just an idea-title, and you can call it anything you want that will go through the mails legally. Fiddlers Bayou, I hope, will be a swell place to write it, and I wish I could be with you, except that I would interfere, or bring lime rickeys at over-frequent times. I guess they are the same. My problem, now beginning to loom, is what am I going to do till the middle of April while waiting to read your manuscript. I shall try to face it with fortitude and the long view. Plus the inner faith and knowledge that what’s White is right.

Mary and I are much interested in your switch from Massachusetts Whites to Silver Cross. We have been having some doubts about our Parmenter Whites, ever since we got some extra birds, locally, of the same breed. The local Whites, we got thirteen of them for luck, are notably better than the Parmenters in feather, style, comb color, voice, and intellect. Nevertheless, we have considered a switch, too, when the present flock runs out of shell fire. We are thinking of White Rocks, our first love from “The Outermost Henhouse” up at our cabin, or a flock of those black ones with the odd red feathers on the neck. Please advise.

If that motor in your brooder electric stove heats up after twenty-five years, throw it away. It’s a fire hazard. Get a new one. What with your grandson’s paper route and your Ford Times commission, dough is for replenishment of equipment and the soul. There is a relationship here which I can’t think through. It has something to do with confidence, but it might trend into arrogance, and so I’m scared of it.

Supplementary report on daylight advance, after my last letter: we are now twenty-six minutes ahead of minimum. Some day they are going to give the Nobel Prize to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, from which all people get the greatest news on earth, which concerns the going of darkness and the coming of light.

I hope your departure day is clear overhead and under wheel, and that your stay at Fiddlers Bayou won’t take you out of state too long. And I thank you for whatever you write, sight unseen, about your life at sea in the lonely shallops. May your grain bill subside, and your birds prosper.

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