The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt

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LOS ANGELES, Monday—I suppose it is old age that sharpens one's appreciation of the beauties of nature, but I am sure that I have never seen a more beautiful spring than this one. Last week when we were finishing up at Lake Success, it was only then, on the drive to and fro, that I gave much thought to the beauties of the countryside. The parkway, with its flowering shrubs and blossoms, was a new joy every day, and as I drove up the Taconic Parkway on Saturday morning and down again on Sunday, it seemed almost breathtaking. On the way up the sky was still gray, as it has been most of the past week, but little patches of blue began to appear here and there as the day wore on. By afternoon it was clear, and Sunday morning I woke, out on my sleeping porch, to a world of sunshine and the most fresh and beautiful green. The young leaves on the trees look so tender and feathery. Amidst the soft greens and the white dogwood, the flowering shrubs and hedges of lilacs make everything, not only beautiful to the eye, but sweetly and faintly scented.

My husband always tried to get back here for the weekend when the dogwood around his cottage on the top of the hill was out. He would sit on the porch and look down at the sea of white blossoms. As I walked the dogs in the woods just under the hill, I looked up and saw how beautifully these trees are blooming this year. The cold does not seem to have hurt them. The trees have been slow in blossoming but now one really feels that life is coming back everywhere in full vigor. I love the spring.

We talked of world trade on my television program and I learned a great deal. Until this half hour of discussion I knew very little about the intricacies of the problem. I knew enough, however, to be sure that there is no subject more important to all of us.

In the development and encouragement of world trade lies the root, perhaps, of a better life for many people throughout the world. It must be worked on with intelligence and by people who have an international point of view, who can see the advantages to the world as a whole, rather than the immediate advantage of one particular country.

No country today can live in isolation from any other country and the cooperative development of the resources of the world is a necessity for all of us. In some under-developed areas of the world lie raw materials which our highly developed industrial and mechanized civilization needs, and it is only when these under-developed countries are helped to increase their production and encouraged to inter-change their goods with the rest of the world, that we can hope, in the industrialized countries, to develop new markets and thereby retain our own high standards of living.

E. R.

(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1950, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART PROHIBITED.)


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, May 23, 1950

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
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Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007

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Digital edition published 2008, 2017 by
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Available under licence from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

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MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.

TEI-P5 edition published on April 28, 2017.

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Transcription created from a photocopy of a UFS wire copy of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
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