In the beginning of the first paragraph, the phrase “parental burrow” suggests
Directions: Read the passage and answer the question.
In this passage from a novel, the narrator has been reading letters of his grandmother. Susan Ward was a young woman, a writer and a mother, whose husband Oliver was working as a mining engineer in Leadville, in the West. Here, the narrator imagines Susan Ward as she spends the winter with her family in Milton, New York, before rejoining her husband in the spring.
From the parental burrow, Leadville seemed so far away that it was only half - real. Unwrapping her apple cheeked son after a sleigh ride down the lane, she had a difficulty in believing that she had ever lived anywhere but here in Milton.
She felt how the placid industry of her days matched the placid industry of all the days that had passed over that farm through six generations. Present and past were less continuous than synonymous. She did not have to come at her grandparents through a time machine. Her own life and that of the grandfather she was writing about showed her similar figures in an identical landscape. At the milldam where she had learned to skate she pulled her little boy on his sled, and they watched a weasel, snow - white for winter, flirt his black - tripped tail in and out of the mill’s timbers. She might have been watching with her grandfather’s eyes. Watching a wintry sky die out beyond black elms, she could not make her mind restore the sight of the western mountains at sunset from her cabin door, or the cabin itself, or Oliver, or their friends. Who were those glittering people intent on raiding the continent for money or for scientific knowledge? What illusion was it that she bridged between this world and that? She paused sometimes; cleaning the room she had always called Grandma’s Room, and thought with astonishment of the memory of Oliver’s great revolver lying on the dresser when he, already a thoroughing Westerner, had come to the house to court her. The town of Milton was dim and gentle, moulded by gentle lives, the current of change as slow through it, as the seep of water through a bog. More than once she thought how wrong those women in San Francisco had been, convinced that their old homes did not welcome them on their return. Last year when Oliver’s professional future was uncertain, she would have agreed. Now, with the future assured in the form of Oliver’s appointment as manager of the Adelaide mine in Leadville, the comfortable past asserted itself unchanged. Need for her husband, like worry over him, was turned low. Absorbed in her child and in the writing of her book, she was sunk in her affection for home. Even the signs of mutability that sometimes jolted her — the whiteness of her mother’s hair, the worn patience of her sister’s face, the morose silences of her brother - in - law,
now so long and black that the women worried about him in low voices - could not more than briefly interrupt the deep security and peace. I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to. It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transpiration, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. I doubt that any one of my son’s generation could comprehend the home feelings of someone like Susan Ward. Despite her unwillingness to live separately from her husband, she could probably have stayed on indefinitely in Milton, visited only occasionally by an asteroid husband. Or she would have picked up the old home and remade it in a new place. What she resisted was being a woman with no real home.
When frontier historians theorise about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut - off who emigrated to the West, they are not talking about people like my grandmother, so much that was cherished and loved, women like her had to give up; and the more they gave it up, the more they carried it helplessly with them. It was a process like ionization: what was subtracted from one pole was added to the other. For that sort of pioneer, the west was not a new country being created, but an old one being reproduced; in that sense our pioneer women were always more realistic than our pioneer men. The moderns, carrying little baggage of the cultural kind, not even living in traditional air, but breathing in to their space helmets, a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that ) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no domestic sentiment; they have had their empathy removed. Their computers have no ghostly feedback of home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!