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Everyone else in my family is dead.
this is a hell of an introductory paragraph
on a Friday in late April
apparently more than 5 mo ago. what happened in between?
Someone had to go to the library, and the grocery;
the essentials!
The blight on the village never came from the Blackwoods; the villagers belonged here and the village was the only proper place for them.
all the different groups delineated so far! Rochesters/Blackwoods, Clarkes/Carringtons, villagers
while I kept my eyes open just enough to see where I was walking—our mother’s brown shoes going up and down—in my mind I was setting the table with a green cloth and bringing out yellow dishes and strawberries in a white bowl.
this kind of dissociation as a coping strategy is reminding me of Eleanor in Hill House. trauma response? focusing on details.
Man could get rich, farming the Blackwood land.
man, the American obsession with land possession (namely of other people's land) rears its ugly head again
“look how far I came today.”
agoraphobia? health? trauma?
Jonas, my cat,
nor was I allowed to gather mushrooms,
did she poison someone (her parents?) with deathcaps?? she's like Wednesday in book form
I thought Constance was supposed to be the one poisoning people?
which was the last time Helen Clarke ever came for tea,
timely foreshadowing. I got so caught up in the story, I forgot this part is in the "past" >5mo
Julian Blackwood?”
so he is blood related. he must die during the 5mo.
“Arsenic in the sugar,”
Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar.”
did you know I once had a nephew, that my brother had a son?
nope, because this is literally the first time he's been mentioned. great exposition and reveal!
“Then, on either side of my brother, his daughter Constance and my wife Dorothy,
I'm feeling the need to draw a diagram now, like it's a murder mystery i can solve
“There was a spider in it,” Constance said to the teapot.
I think she was covering for her sister.
There were jars of jam made by great-grandmothers,
ew? this seems like a hoarding compulsion
I was one-third safe.
superstitions
the boy
not using his name
All cat stories start with the statement: “My mother, who was the first cat, told me this,”
“I’m not afraid to eat anything Constance cooks,” Charles said. “Really?” said Uncle Julian. “I congratulate you. I was referring to the effect a weighty meal like pancakes is apt to have on a delicate stomach. I suppose your reference was to arsenic.”
😂😂
wondered about going down to the creek, but I had no reason to suppose that the creek would even be there, since I never visited it on Tuesday mornings;
took Constance along the porch
you're just going to let the guy in the wheelchair fend for himself?
trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.
house as metaphor for the family?
Our house was a castle, turreted and open to the sky.
I discovered that I was no longer allowed to go to the creek;
these rules are coping mechanisms?
our mother’s lovely broken things
I really don't understand why they care so much about their mother's pretty things when they were perfectly fine with her being murdered?
My new magical safeguards
it's soooo tempting to psychoanalyze these characters. OCD?
the town, in both instances, is pretty well recognizable as North Bennington, Vermont.
(apart from Uncle Julian).
I mean, she DID poison him. he just didn't die from it.
Despite declaring her eighteen years in the first paragraph, Merricat feels younger, her
omg I've been thinking of her as like 13. that really shifts perspective
