A snowfall can reset the city’s mood
Under the dove-gray low-swung cloud come up from the Gulf to scatter
Its benediction of deep rain, endlessly flashing and pouring;
Here, in the drift of the years …
I have come back to this point of repose, to these stones side by side in the grass;
Turning as the earth turns against far Orion’s fierce whirlwind of stars.
—John Gould Fletcher, “In Mount Holly” (1926 or 1927)
Snow. Blessed reprieve from the twin curses of our time: noise and speed. A hush laid over our entropic city. A blanket of aesthetic uniformity laid over our chaotic landscape.
The further we get from the year 2020, the more I share the outrage of the people who protested stateand federal-mandated cessation of ordinary social and economic activity: Denying people their religious rituals and daily lives (working, buying, selling, visiting, schooling, strolling) was somewhere between short-sighted and sick.
That said, the quiet was nice. I remember exceptionally clear skies with no air traffic and the ease of crossing Cantrell Road on foot. I walked miles and miles those spring days, thanks in part to our conservative, pragmatic, now dearly missed governor, who had the sense not to ban people from the outdoors, where good health is generated and where the odds of airborne viral transmission are extremely low.
In Arkansas, we enjoy the blessing of small communities. Here in Little Rock, could we not agree as a community on an occasional voluntary economic moratorium, not a shutdown, but a slowdown of our frenetic car-bound daily lives? Say, when it snows?
A good blanket of snow is such a rarity in these latitudes; could we treat it with reverence? Could we agree not to drive our cars unless absolutely necessary until most of the snow is melted?
Fresh snow is so good for sledding, taking the dog out, walking around. Snow gives us time and opportunity to talk to our neighbors. Snow makes it safe for kids to play in the street. Here in the South where it’s so rare, snow gives us a little temporary paradise.
Cars mess it all up. Their weight melts the snow. Streets become impossible to cross. Plowed snow piles up on sidewalks, and melting and refreezing creates all kinds of hazards for the pedestrian.
Conservatives love to talk about old-fashioned small-town American life. A good snowfall offers us a few days to live the real thing. Next time we get a few inches of snow, please accept the offer. Push the car keys out of sight, go outside, and dig in.
Being “progressive” requires proclaiming a love of nature these days, so I hope that those who identify that way will, the next time we get a few inches of snow, enjoy the natural phenomenon on foot, rather than disrupting it by cruising around in all-wheel-drive Subarus.
I was three blocks from Mount Holly Cemetery when the snow began to fall. It came down with surprising force, but I was able to trace my usual route and pause at the resting place of Marcella Penzel, in the family crypt that I wrote about last week; one reader who remembers Miss Marcella notes that the family’s willingness to loan out temporary space in the crypt seems to anticipate Airbnb.
A correction: I misquoted the Democrat last week by writing that Marcella, during her three years at the Ogontz School for Young Ladies, had taken “a regular school course and a special school course.” The second phrase should have read “special French course.”
The three Penzel sisters were not the only Little Rock girls sent to school in Philadelphia in the late 1800s. A 1933 retrospective in the Arkansas Gazette printed an 1880s photo of Josie Clendenin, Georgia Watkins, and Anna Eakin, who went to school together in Chestnut Hill, Pa., after their graduation from Arkansas Female College.
The Gazette mentions Josie and Georgia in its coverage of the flower ceremony during commencement exercises at Arkansas Female College in June 1879, so all three girls must have gone to Philadelphia shortly thereafter.
Josie Clendenin, a granddaughter of Major Isaac Watkins, returned to Arkansas and married William A. Royston, whose father, Grandison Delaney Royston, was the only person to serve in the Arkansas constitutional conventions of 1836 and 1874.
Josie’s capacity for friendship comes through not only in her enduring relationship with Georgia and Anna (Georgia was her first cousin), but in her relationship with fellow Little Rock matron Jean Cravens Hollenberg. Henry Hollenberg recollects in his memoir that Jean (his mother) and Josie could “talk for hours, each talking at the same time, and each understanding the other.”
(The affinity appears to have been generational; in later life, Henry Hollenberg married Josephine (Deanie) Heiskell Harrison, granddaughter of Josie Clendenin Royston.)
Georgia Watkins was the daughter of Chief Justice George Watkins and Sophia Fulton Curran, daughter of Matilda Nowland Fulton and William Savin Fulton, the last territorial governor of Arkansas. Georgia married Pope Yeatman and remained in Chestnut Hill.
Georgia was raised at Curran Hall in Little Rock, so she would have had an easy walk to Arkansas Female College, which was held from 1874 to 1889 in the mansion that Albert Pike built on property he bought from Chester Ashley in 1839, now known as the Pike-Fletcher-Terry House.
Josie, too, lived nearby, so Anna was the only member of the trio who would have needed to board in Little Rock. Anna’s parents were Judge John R. and Elizabeth Erwin Eakin of Washington, Ark. “It was the custom of the women of the Eakin household,” the Gazette reported in 1933, “to gather in the afternoons for sewing and the speaking of French.”
Anna died shortly after marrying George Helm, a plantation owner from Greenville, Miss.
It’s late January now, and a deep rain has washed away the snow, along with the salt and sand we put out.
The ground at Mount Holly is sodden, and I’m grateful for the lingering fog.
My usual route here takes me past the Pike-Fletcher-Terry House, and I think of John Gould as a frail boy in the 1890s, not allowed far from the grounds.
Later, he went far. “From the seas I have crossed, and the lands I have known …”
And now, we can visit the very point of repose in his lines above, where he and Charlie May now lie.