“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

During this time also Jane’s mother, Marie, lost her home in Saratoga Springs, NY, and was placed in a state-run nursing home in nearby Middle Grove. Through the mail mother and daughter patched up their volatile relationship enough to begin exchanging letters fairly regularly. Jane never told Marie about the Seth material, or her symptoms. Marie even accepted me as her daughter’s husband. The two gave each other Christmas gifts. Jane sent her mother nightwear and stationery and other small useful presents. Marie always sent her daughter sweaters that she had knitted with great difficulty because of her misshapen fingers; invariably the garments were too large. Seth suggested that Jane not wear them in any case because of the roiled emotions that had existed between the two almost from Jane’s birth; gifts from the mother could still carry those feelings. Mother and daughter were to never meet again: Marie died shortly before 1975. By then it wasn’t easy for Jane to travel, and we didn’t make the approximately 400-mile roundtrip to attend the funeral. Later the nursing home was closed by the state. A mutual friend sent us photographs of the big old red-brick building, three stories high, shuttered and dark and deserted among the trees and in the snow.

Actually, Laurel and I drive past 458 often, without paying much attention to it on our way from Sayre to the hill house. But now we were there on its grounds, focusing upon that precious symbol where Jane and I had lived for 15 years. I hadn’t set foot in 458 since the day we’d moved to the hill house 27 years ago. Incredible! Already, as I pushed open the heavy front door for the six of us, I felt like an intruder, that my footsteps were stirring up the past. We tramped noisily up the narrow and turning stairs to face a fire door guarding the second floor. Past that, we were in the narrow hall that led to a similar door guarding a stairwell at the back of the building. The hall was much shorter and gloomier than I remembered it to be. The sounds of our voices were crowded; the space we stood in seemed to be so confining, with the doors at each end, that I marveled that my dear wife and I had lived in the house for all that time. Apartments 4 and 5, the ones Jane and I had rented (we could afford only Apartment 5 for the first several years) opened off each side of the hall. Apartment 4 was empty; its door was on a short chain that let me push it open a bit to peek into a now-deserted living room that Jane and I had known so well.