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Los Angeles, Cal. R.F.D.#6 Bot 168.
June 12, 1914
Dear Dadie and all:
I have been intending to write to you for a long time and now I can't find your letter, but I have been so blue and discouraged that I have almost gone crazy, it seems, and then I have picked nearly all the berries this year. We haven't had any pickers. The berries were so cheap. I have gotten up at 4:30 o'clock, some mornings. Papa don't care. He says better let them rot on the bushes. You know he takes no responsibility of any kind on him. Never pays any attention to the grocery bills or water bills or taxes or,
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in fact, any business and never writes a letter and, with Mama's sickness, it has been almost too much for me. If I had wings, I would fly away. Mama was in bed Sunday till noon. Didn't sleep any at all, hardly, Saturday night and Monday night. I believe she threw up and,night before last, didn't sleep any till in the morning. Last night, she slept and so it goes and I, of course, don't sleep well. How could I?
I haven't menstrated, [menstruated], since Mama was sick in bed about 5 months. Till Wednesday, I didn't know whether I ever would again or not.
I have done more work this, [signing?], than
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I ever did, [[inserted above]: 2.]] before to try to get the place in shape to sell. I have hoed all day long till dark. Have trimmed berries and irrigated and raked, [illegible], and stacked it and barrowed and cultivated one day. Papa said, "Oh, you can do it. It is easy." And he thinks nothing of it. He is a German, you know, and I have curried Dolly and hitched her up for him and cleaned out the manure in her stall and loaded it up and loaded the wagon for him to go to market and unloaded when he came home and cleaned chicken yards and
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all kinds of jobs. I have had the blues before, for I knew he was queer and incapable and careless and incompetent and shiftless, but I this night, maybe, he could make this old, [ravel?], go as he was a failure at everything else, but I see he can't do this, even and when I know Mama has suffered like this for 28 years. I want to die and get out of my misery or go to the poor farm or some where. Oh, Edith, I could tell you volumes how I have taken subscriptions to magazines and sold rose beads and we have made orange
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3. marmalade to sell to the stores to pay grocery bills and any money that was given to me at Christmas time went the same way and Papa don't care at all. He says his money all went to the doctors. You know he hates a doctor, doesn't believe in reading a newspaper, only his Bible. That is all he ever studied in his life. He doesn't believe in life insurance or lodges or socials or jokes or fun or anything of the kind.
He says he doesn't get any thanks for anything he does. I wonder what a man gets married for. Mama should have