To Be Remembered as Time of Love Allow...

To Be Remembered as Time or Love Allow…

“…the following would be to my Manes, the most gratifying…”

~Thomas Jefferson, written on a treasured scrap of paper, Spring of 1826…

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“Though unsigned and undated, this scrap of manuscript reads like a codicil to the formal will that Jefferson drew up in March, 1826, a few months before his death. His heirs clearly viewed the page in that light and arranged to carry out Jefferson’s wishes. But by design his words suggest a kind of anti-will as well: a testament from Jefferson’s otherworldly ‘MANES’ rather than from Jefferson himself…

“A meticulous custodian of his papers, Jefferson clearly intended for the plain sheet describing this monument to come to light just as it did: carefully folded among the keepsakes of his wife’s death but unpolished and unsigned, coarse preamble of its own to a complicated exercise in remembrance.

“Perhaps it is foolish to scrutinize this note so closely, but its haunting, ruminative tone is difficult to dismiss. As Andrew Burstein points out, Jefferson lodged it in a particularly sacred place among his personal mementoes. The monument that it describes was built and then rebuilt, after years of souvenir chips had damaged the stone, each time replicating the sketch that Jefferson drew in the upper left-hand corner of the page…For the moment at least, let’s consider the paper itself as the genuine monument: a more intimate and more substantive message to its readers than Monticello’s physical shrine provides, pointing to the dialogue between permanence and impermanence, reason and feeling, optimism and resignation that marks so much of Jefferson’s thought…”

~Essay from: A Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson, ed. Frank Shuffelton.

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~Monticello—October, 1826

To Be Remembered as Time or Love Allow…

~The sheaf of paper means nothing to her in this moment.

Enfolded in sallow creases are rose petals, some fresh like they had been plucked off the buds of morning; others, black to moldering dust, leaving a lingering, dying sweetness—fading memories—strewn as the fall leaves, across browning grass.

The softness of the Indian summer—she remembers well, faint despondency—this lambent, violet-tinged air of the Blue Ridge, brushing the trees, gentling the edges of morbid headstones, sharpening the clean lines of a newly raised obelisk in shafts of gilt shadow.

The peace is deceptive, a hum of mid-autumn insects, first birdsong of twilight, drains into the hard silence enveloping the two women standing before the monolithic grave-marker.

The note exchanged hands, passed from one to the other, an insignificant scrap of paper used to scrawl a day’s careless itinerary, evident on the portions visible. The fragment has been folded ever-so neatly though, great care taken to seal up the edges, retain and preserve the rose petals.

Eyes flick away nervously, then skirt back.

They have not seen each other for almost two decades.

The smaller woman, senior by a solid fifteen years, shy on her seventh decade, marvels how Mrs. Randolph still possesses that elegance of height, unaffected by age, constant child-bearing, of grief multiplied by disillusionment and loss—of loved ones and treasured homes. Her features have not worn the years well, however. A more delicate impression of her father, the appraising remarks from curious visitors to the President’s Mansion, in the first seasons of his initial term, when Mrs Randolph visited the Capital City.