“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane’s ideas — and mine, too — have matured considerably since I wrote a month ago that she was thinking of converting half of our garage into a writing room, with its attendant back porch. In fact, we’ve agreed to go ahead with that project this summer. It will certainly be a long and noisy endeavor. Now that he’s finished the front porch, our contractor is free to begin work at the back of the house as soon as possible.)

As I suppose is almost always the case with tourists in romantic, faraway places, we had many ties back home. Although Jane’s father, and my own, had died the previous year (in 1971), our mothers were still living: Jane’s in a nursing home in upstate New York, and mine at the Butts family home in Sayre, Pennsylvania, which is only 18 miles from Elmira and just south of the New York State border. (While Jane and I were away my mother stayed with one of my brothers, who lives some 60 miles below Sayre.)

All of our possessions were in Elmira. To convert to trailer living meant that we’d have to dispose of most of what we owned, including paintings and manuscripts, furniture, files, books, and many written records — something we probably couldn’t have brought ourselves to do. And how could we go to Florida and leave all of our friends, and how inconvenient would it be to deal with a publisher (Prentice-Hall) headquartered way up north in New Jersey? Jane was much more willing to attempt the move than I was, but I think we knew all along that beneath our questions and feelings the idea of moving was more like a shared dream, or a probable reality we chose not to explore during our current physical lives. Jane’s mother was to die within three months of our return home, mine over a year later (in November 1973).