The Rope

Emily Dickinson stopped going to church around thirty. By her mid-thirties she was speaking to callers through a partially closed door. When Ralph Waldo Emerson slept ninety feet away at her brother's house in December 1857, she did not cross the lawn. When her father's coffin was laid out in the entrance hall on June 19, 1874, she stayed upstairs with the door cracked open and listened. Her contribution was a wreath of daisies. In her final illness she refused to be examined by the family doctor, who had to diagnose her by watching her walk past a doorway.

And yet.

Whenever she saw the neighborhood children playing in the garden below, she filled a basket with gingerbread, carried it to a back window the mothers couldn't see, tied it to a rope, and lowered it. She called the children storm-tossed pirates and lost circus performers. This is a woman who would not walk downstairs for Emerson rigging a covert basket-and-rope delivery for children she wouldn't answer the door to.

One dry day the pantry was bare. She filled the basket with two cups of raw raisins and lowered it anyway.

The pastor's son, remembering it half a century later, called her the children's laughing goddess of plenty.

She never came down.