Sarah Francelle Coleman (Heywood) (1860-1937) - "Breathings From My Soul"

(Sarah Francelle Coleman Heywood is the great grandmother of the contributor, Richard N. Heywood)

Breathings From My SoulSarah Francelle Heywood

 I go back into these remote parts, these rarely visited uplands and turns of memory. Impressions crowd upon one another and overlap one another. I look into the jumbled stores of the middle distance of memory.

Love is an hysterical passion, now high, now low, now exalted and now intensely physical. No one has ever yet dared to tell a love story completely--its exalted moments, its debased moments. We tell only the net consequences, the ruling effect, a strange melancholy emptiness of intention. We are all things that make and pass, striving upon a hidden mission out to sea.

One is jerked out of one’s stratum and lives crosswise for the rest of the time. Discordant murmurings of the soul. One recalls acts but cannot recall motives. Looking into the past is like rummaging in a neglected attic. Slippery and under gray skies that showed no gleam of hope. Confused, a mass of impressions as discordant unsystematic self, contradictory as life.

To see one’s married life open before one; very much alike on the inside but so different outside. We are on different levels and can be placed in our stations by an outward appearance as perceptible as the distinctly colored stratum on the side of a deep canyon, --wealth cowardly taking the upper strata as it were, above the middle stream.

The soft amber sunshine fell on the many-colored houses. Twilight had faded into somber night. The city of Los Angeles was lit up with sparkling jewels and floods of light that cast abysmal shadows.