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D.H. Lawrence Society of North America

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Nomination Appendix 5:  (Letter)

National Register Nomination for the D.H. Lawrence Ranch

LETTER FROM D. H. LAWRENCE TO SISTER, EMILY KING ("PAMELA")

 

Kiowa Ranch.  c/o Del Monte Ranch, Questa.  N. Mexico
Saturday 30 May [1925] 

 

My dear Pamela

      I had your letter yesterday:  am thinking that by now Ada should have received the parcel from Mexico with the puma skin for you.  Hope it won't go lost.

     We are getting on well here.  I am much better‑‑almost my normal self again.  But I have to beware of the very hot sun, and of the sudden cold. 

     We have been on our own ranch all the time:  only stayed down on Del Monte five days.  But Brett is down there, in a house of her own.  The water from the Gallina is for here:  it runs gaily past the gate, though the stream isn't very big now.  It is a terribly dry spring—everything burnt up.  I go out every morning to the field, to turn the water over a new patch.  So the long 15‑acre field is very green, but the ranges are dry as dry sand, and nothing hardly grows. Only the wild strawberries are flowering full, and the wild gooseberries were thick with blossoms, and little flocks of humming birds came for them.‑‑We are now building a new corral for the four horses‑‑and we are having a black cow on Monday‑‑and we've got white hens and brown ones, and a white cock—and Trinidad caught a little wild rabbit, which is alive and very cheerful.  That's all the stock:  except for Rufina's sister and two little Indian tots with black eyes.  The sister has only got an unknown Indian name, and speaks nothing but Indian.‑‑We made a garden, and the things are coming up.  We have to turn the stream on the garden, in dozens of tiny channels, to irrigate it.  And the nights sometimes are still very cold.‑‑Trinidad saw a deer just behind the houses, last week.  But I don't want him to shoot it.

     I hope you will come one day and spend the summer:  we will manage it, when we are all a bit richer.

     By now you will have got a copy of St. Mawr:  and there is a description of the ranch in that.

     Glad you've got another dog.  Heaven knows what is best for Peg:  I hated teaching.

     Here is the kiss for Joan x

                                        x

                                                                                    Love  DHL

 Frieda's nephew Friedel Jaffe is here‑‑quite a nice boy of 21.

 

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. 5, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 257‑258.