The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
APRIL 19, 1949
[This column has emendations. View original version]
NEW YORK, Monday—We celebrated Easter again yesterday in the little church at Hyde Park. The flowers made the altar beautiful and the day outside was all that one could wish for, even though the wind was chilly. The sky was blue, and the daffodils and some of the other early garden flowers stood up bravely in the sun.
The message of Easter is always a beautiful one, and the message of Joseph Auslander's poem, "There Is No Death," rings in our ears:
The same message was carried by the sermon in church yesterday morning and the same message is carried by the spring. The world comes back to life, and how bravely nature starts her battle over again.
A few children came after lunch yesterday and raced over the lawn hunting for Easter eggs. We had the pleasure, too, of having Monsieur and Madame Etienne Dennery, two young French people, drive up from New York City for lunch. He is with the French delegation to the United Nations.
At this time of year I'm not at all enthusiastic about spending my weekdays in New York City and not being able to watch spring come to every living thing around us from day to day. Seeing things only once a week, however, does make one more conscious of the changes as they come.
The wild cherry blossoms and the peach blossoms are out and what I have always called shad bushes gleam white in the woods. I was not well educated in my childhood in the names of flowers and trees, so when I walk now with the youngsters I am constantly confronted with questions that I cannot answer. I wish my grandmother had thought it was wise to educate a girl in botany. Now when I look at the beautifully frail white flowers blown by the wind along the roadside and the children ask their names, I can only say I have always called them "wind flowers," which is probably not the correct name!
There are so many things I would like to take the time to learn. Many books sit on my shelves ready for study, but I go on doing things that probably could be better done by other people. Perhaps someday before too long I shall try it!
In our Social Committee meetings at Lake Success, we have been moving rather slowly in covering the first covenant on Freedom of Information. I was reminded yesterday, however, that it took us two months to finish the Declaration of Human Rights, so I suppose a controversial question such as the three covenants before us on Freedom of Information should take us at least a month.
E. R.
(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1949, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC., REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART PROHIBITED.)
Names and Terms Mentioned or Referenced
Persons
- Dennery, Étienne 1903-1979 [ index ]
French academic and diiplomat
[ LC | ISNI | VIAF | Wikidata | SNAC ] - Dennery, Etienne, Madame [ index ]
Spouse of Etienne Dennery - Hall, Mary Livingston Ludlow, 1843-1919 [ index ]
ER's maternal grandmother
Geographic
- [ index ] New York (N.Y., United States)
About this document
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, April 19, 1949
Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007
Digital edition published 2008, 2017 by
The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project
Available under licence from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.
Published with permission from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.
MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.
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