“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The photograph of me, taken and dated by my father [Robert Sr.], has been kept in one of the Butts family albums for 53 years. In it the time is June 1, 1921. I’m almost 2 years old. I have curly light-colored hair. I wear a one-piece suit, long white stockings, and black shoes. I stand in the side yard of the house my parents rented in Mansfield, a small college town in northeastern Pennsylvania. Perhaps a dozen chicks cluster in the grass at my feet while I stare down at them, quite entranced. In blurred focus behind me an unknown teen-age girl sits on a swing that’s suspended from a tree limb, and an empty wicker stroller-type carriage [mine?] stands beside her. Parked in a driveway in back of her is a four-door touring car with a fabric top. I might add that Mansfield is only 35 miles below Elmira, N.Y., where Jane and I live now.

The three of us got along well as children, although our natures and interests varied considerably. All of us went through grade school and high school in Sayre, a railroad town in northeastern Pennsylvania: Our father settled his family there in 1923 when he opened an auto-repair and battery shop. The separations in the family began to happen after Linden and I graduated from high school, left Sayre, and started to work our respective ways through college and an art school. Then came long periods of military service for the three of us (World War II for Linden and me). Years passed before I understood how much my parents had been affected by the departure of their children.