[Blessings2You]

My Mom clipped this from a newspaper or magazine so many years ago that it could hardly be read, and I typed it out (yes, typed with a typewriter) probably thirty years ago so it wouldn't be lost. She had it memorized, but she is gone now.
It was written by a woman named Florence B. Jacobs.

THE HERETIC

Her careless habits fret the neighborhood--
No special day to wash, and stockings could
Lie waiting for a necessary darn
Through a whole warm spring week! Beside the barn
Grow lilies brought from proper garden beds
To splash old shingles with outlandish reds.
(No house plants, though; she wants to know why she
Should bother when a shapely cedar tree
Out in the yard is green from spring to spring
And God Himself attends its watering.)

Instead of doing hemstitch or filet
She reads; and once the Circle heard her say
It seemed desirable that one should bind
A little edge of trimming on the mind!

She fools with poetry in the morning when
Housework should be attended to, and then
Makes jelly in the laguid afternoons
Or goes out walking under summer moons
Like a young girl...And once she even said,
Traipsing the fields to pick a cherry bough,
Her house might just as well be dusty now
As April mornings after she is dead!