Rosa to Jessie Northcutt, 15 January 1943, Patzcuaro, Michoacan -- "patience tops all virtues in this wonderful country"

Looking back through letters, I think living in Patzcuaro in 1942-43 was the happiest time in Rosa's life. She was 25, completely in love, thrilled to get out of New York City, and was immersed in photography, art, and the kind of "figure it out" homemaking she always liked best. Knowing Murray would be drafted soon gave the pleasure an extra edge.
 

Dearest Mother,

Have just finished repairing my shower curtain. I don't mean to pass myself off as a pioneer for the accomplishment, but it isn't a bad curtain for 35 cents -- 20 cents for 4 meters of pale yellow stuff that looks slightly like linen, 10 cents for four pairs of large, rustproof earrings to hand it from, and 3 cents for a nice hand-whittled pole. Plus 2 cents worth of buckshot which, sewn into the hem, makes it hang beautifully.

The moonlight is always very bright here in the clear mountain air, with the reflection from the lake, but tonight it is especially effective from our windows. Yesterday Don Juan finished painting all the trees with white lime and tonight the whole orchard is shining silver, stretching in long rows like a ballet chorus. The trees are very small and will not bear very much, but one tiny peach tree is bursting into pink blossom, apparently unaware that this is January and there is frost nearly every night.

Bluey grows more like a dog and more lovable every day. Walking to the hotel for mail today, with Haj at his heels and Bluey rolling along at hers, Murray got ten offers for him which is about the daily average. When I saw he is growing to look like a dog it may be indulgence, because no small dog was ever so fat before. We were quite relieved when he first barked because it might well have been an oink instead of a woof.

... You would be amazed to see how many things your money bought in Patzcuaro. And I know it could have bought some pretty important things in Tacoma too, like a new rug. I'm awfully glad you made yourself a Christmas present of the Minton ware. Really satisfyingly beautiful things are never an extravagance. You are certain to get their value in pleasure from just looking at them. I confess tho, Mother, that I can't think of a group of seventeen people I'd like to eat dinner with all at the same time. Murray wouldn't let me buy a pottery set for eight because he said there weren't that many people he'd invite to dinner. Howard set the limit at four for Judy, but then he is really anti-social. Of course that was in New York, where hospitality is comparatively undiscovered. I wish you had my pretty coffee set to use with your China. My plates are very attractive, with incredibly childlike drawings of horses, cows, canoes, houses, etc. in the center, but they are half an inch thick and rather out of tune with the dainty, graceful sterling. It has to be graceful; I designed it myself.

Among the other good things 1943 has brought to the Morgans are the end of Murray's book, which has already been sent to Howard, and encouraging war news on our own small, but very satisfactory radio. We brought the radio back from Mexico City as a Christmas present to each other when we found we couldn't afford an enlarger. While most of our programs come on the shortwave band we get amazing reception at night on standard broadcasts. Tonight we heard the Fred Allen program exactly as you probably heard him. The president's speech was a clear here as it was in Washington D.C.

The familiar programs like Jack Benny and Information Please, and on New Year's Day, the Rose Bowl game, bring Patzcuaro much closer to Tacoma. The wonderful concert programs on every evening around midnight have filled the only real lack in Patzcuaro life.

Murray has just wounded my feelings by suggesting that the chocolate fudge I made today would be good with ice cream under it, the fudge being an unusually fine syrup. I think the altitude is to blame. I would be very happy to get the ice cream, but the nearest is in Morelia, the capital of this state. ...

Not only ice cream but cream is unavailable except on rare occasions in this country. Coffee is served black like most European coffee or with hot milk as it is in England. I have learned to like the hot milk combination. Anyway we have the coffee and it is cheap, abundant, and very good. Last week when the house was filled with the fragrance of fresh coffee roasting over the charcoal fire in the kitchen I thought of the one cup a day limit at home and felt very selfish but it is impossible to send a grain of it across the border.

We, Amelia mostly, made tamales too last week, a much more complicated process than you imagine. Since our corn hasn't even been planted yet we had to buy the grain, a thing that wouldn't happen to most of our neighbors. The first step is a lye bath for the corn, very short so that it doesn’t turn into hominy but is slightly softened.

Wood gathering in Erongricuaro -- credit: Rosa Morgan

The next day the corn spends sunning on a large pottery tray in the back yard. On the third day it is milled in a little hand mill which also handles the coffee and is an extravagance justified by the back-aches which accompany grinding in the stone metate. The materials which went into the sauce, however, were ground in a large, three footed, hollowed stone with a smaller stone, called a molcajete. Tomatoes, onions, garlic, a "mild" dried red pepper, cloves, something like sage and bayleaf, and a dozen other spices, all of which Amelia purchased in little twists of brown paper, went into the most fragrant and piquant, and also the hottest sauce you ever tasted. Also into the sauce went two pounds of well-cooked pork loin. The secret of good tamales, Amelia said, is beating. And for an hour and a half she stood beating, hard, the shortening into the corn meal. Amelia is not big but I think she could cure Glenn of his handshaking tricks. To finish the tamales, meat and sauce go into the cornmeal, which is spread in well-washed white corn husks and each neat package is fitted into our biggest olla (pottery jug) and the collection is steamed rather than boiled for about an hour. It must have been discouraging for Amelia to see the results of a day's work disappear in a few minutes.

Mother, will you look up the recipe for butterscotch, banana cream pie in the cook book from Hoquiam and send it to me, along with one for biscuits and any others you can think of? As I mentioned before, there are no prepared or semi-prepared foods, especially desserts like jello, chocolate pudding, and Hostess cakes or ice cream, so I need a cook book like I never did before. I have one printed in Spanish but, as if that didn't complicate it enough, the measurements are in grams and kilos instead of cups and teaspoons and I have no scales. Besides, the results of most of the recipes would be as unfamiliar as the ingredients are, and I would never know whether I had a success.

So far I have no oven, except for a small cast-iron Dutch oven which hasn't been too successful, but I hope to bring one back from Guadalajara where we are going tomorrow.

We had a turkey here on New Year's Day, or rather served at the stroke of midnight, with Bill and Carmella as guests but it was baked in a bread baker's oven, a friend of Amelia's. It was a good turkey but not quite a U.S. one. The stuffing, Mexican style, had carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, onions and chopped zucchini squash in it, but it was flavored with sage, among other things, and it had pineapple slices centered with cherries around it. Absent were sweet potatoes, cranberries, pies, mince or pumpkin, and other turkey trimmings.

We had a wonderful Christmas dinner at the Fords' house. Jacqueline is a genius, and besides that, she has eight people working in the kitchen. I've never tasted a better mince pie. And I've never seen such a pretty tree as their long needled pine tree with colored bows tied all over it. The walls were decorated in surrealistic confections in colored paper which are more appropriate for a festive, celebrating air than any holiday trimmings I've seen. All of these things including the fact that Gordon gave us one of his pictures, made especially for us, didn't make the day seem like Christmas, but as Murray said, it was like a very nice Thanksgiving.

The carving came back, along with Bill and his 4-F. I have it now

We said goodbye to Bill [Fett] and saw him off on the train to Laredo and his army induction four days ago. He was miserable about leaving Patzcuaro and we were sorry to see him go, only partly because he took with him a beautiful wood carving which he had loaned to us and we had grown to feel possessive about. Standing above our fireplace it gave a special character to the whole room which is gone now. We still have a head carved by Bill and two of his pictures and we will see a lot of his wife, Carmella.

...

The General's promised horse has not arrived yet, but I expect it any day. It has to come by train, I think, from Mexico, abut 200 miles. When it does arrive I will need something to wear on it. Slacks are not worn here, where the women wear their skirts to their ankles, and I have none. (Slacks, not ankles) If you could roll up my old green breeches and send them to me, care of the hotel, I don't think the duty will be too much. They were only $2.00 new and they are well worn now. ... Boots will probably be cheaper here than the mailing cost and duty.

Is Bob home now? I would like to hear from him and from Glenn. According to a report in Time, most of the fighting against the Japs in the jungles of New Guinea, a mosquito and fever filled, truly unpleasant place, is being done by former members of the Washington and Oregon National Guard. I'm glad my brothers weren't plump enough to be eligible for that particular part of the war.

It's very late now, nearly 3:00 and here in the country we go to bed early usually. Tomorrow we will leave for Guadalajara. We've planned the trip since Christmas, or rather since the scholarship check arrived, but had to postpone it daily waiting for one tire to be repaired in Morelia. Patience tops all virtues in this wonderful country.

Love,

Rosa and Murray

P.S. Give my love to Dad Morgan. Constance Ann sends out most of the correspondence from that end now. She said in her last letter than you were looking beautiful.

Umnak, 9 November 1944--"everything conspires to make me homesick"

Happy Birthday, Nunny… [Rosa’s 26^th]

Everything conspires to make me homesick for our many homes. On Monday I saw the short “Birth of a Volcano,” which is far more about Patzcuaro than about Paracutín. Then on Tuesday there was the election and the memory of that wild, weird night four years ago when Koski and the porcine butcher were passed out in the corner, RVM [Russell Mack] was writing incoherent leads about his defeat by Martin Smith, and we were racing around in the Ford (water dripping through the ventilator onto your legs), picking up results at the outlying schools and basement polling places. And now as I write, on Wednesday night-Thursday morning, Radio Calcutta, of all places is playing the intermezzo from Hari Janos, the Hungarian opera, and I can almost smell the warm soft smell of the Danube and feel the cool of the night on Margaretan Island [in the Danube at Budapest]. Last night we tuned in on Radio Tokyo to see what they had to say about the election and got instead the Fantastic Symphony. 

About the election. Because of the time differential, it was only two when the polls closed in most of the eastern states. We began getting the results over shortwave from San Francisco. The United Network—the shortwave stations in San Francisco which we used to listen to from Mexcio—had a system worked out which divided the time between the networks. About every quarter hour they switched from Blue to National to CBS to Mutual, but before long CBS and National were so far ahead in adding up the results that most of the time they stayed with them. CBS was an unprejudiced best, mainly because all the National broadcasters got so interested in describing the elaborate procedure they had evolved for getting the results fast that they forgot to say what the results were. 

I caught only a couple of hours sleep in the in the early afternoon. My alarm was set for three, and when it went off I put on the tea, turned on the radio and settled down for the day. In our hut we were largely pro-democratic. (In the hut next to ours Col. McCormic would feel at home. They burn tapers for [Westbrook] Pegler on Labor Day.) Of those not on duty when the broadcasts began, everyone in our hut was pro-Roosevelt, with the exception of one kid from Alaska, who could not vote for President anyway. (We kid him about being a second-class citizen). Consequently we enjoyed the listening greatly.

Listening to the returns

By five o’clock, when it was time for dinner, there was no decision yet. I could not bring myself to take time out for dinner, partly because I wanted to keep on listening and partly, I suppose, it was a subconscious reaction based on my desire to be in a newspaper office with a partly filled dummy spread on the desk, the stacks of teletyped news piling up around me and the backshop boss clamoring for copy. If I could not have the type of confusion I wanted I would not take the confusion of the mess hall. So I missed a chicken dinner. But I got it cold at midnight, which was even better.

By six o’clock it was dark enough outside so that we could pick up the domestic band stations and I alternated between KNX Hollywood and KOL Seattle. MNX is CBS, and the only drawback was that it had no returns from Washington. As a matter of fact the Congressional results in Washington still haven’t come in, except for the good news that we still have Coffee in the House and that DeLacy is to be, as your friend put it, broadened. [Rep. John Coffee’s resolution to allow live radio broadcasts of the House of Representatives proceedings, though not fully implemented before he was defeated by Thor Tollefson of Tacoma in 1946, eventually paved the way for C-SPAN]

Once Dewey had made his nice little speech, tardily, I went over to see if there was any mail. I had two letters from my one love, one of which was written on the Muni News report. Reading that I felt really sorry for Lorin [Peterson]. The oblique attack on the P.U.D. bill without mentioning the Pacific Power and Light Co., and the listing “Identified with left wing bloc” always matched with “Intelligent. Respected in his community” for his opponent.

If the Washington local elections followed the national election, however, and the only time I can think of that they didn’t was in the 1940 election of Langlie; and since Wallgren got it—thank Tao—I think it isn’t too much to hope that the Third District got rid of its sad specimen in the House. I find myself unenthused by the election of [Warren] Magnuson, but he was the lesser evil.

Today the Republicans, especially the noisy ones, are having a rather rough time. A couple of them did not show up for breakfast. And one of them got so mad he stomped out without eating his eggs. Many of the comments were considerably below the level set by Dewey and Bricker. The Corsican [Enrico Traina], for instance, blamed the results on “the niggers and the Jews.” And one of the men claimed it was the WPA votes, which shows how deep habit runs in politics.
 

As for the people next to you at the symphony, my sweet, I have often had the same reaction, although up here we did not get very steamed up about the election.

One thing about the election which I wonder if you could find out for me. One of the most wrapt Republicans here claimed that he heard a radio announcement on Monday night in which Stalin asked for Roosevelt’s re-election. Now I am quite sure that Stalin would be all for it, for obvious reasons, but I cannot conceive of his pulling a political boner like that. Was there anything about it in the U.S. papers?

 

Janitzio, in Lake Patzcuaro, from http://www.lakepatzcuaro.org/DayOfDead.html

About the picture of Patzcuaro and Paracutín. It had a lot of pictures of the island, in very good Technicolor, and shot of the west end of the lake, in which I thought I could catch the white of the Ford’s house. I recognized several of the Indians, and the parts of Janitzio looked so familiar I almost smelled the pescado blanco cooking. While the show left me horribly lonesome for you, it has made writing on the novel much easier. Details come to me so much easier. This month should see the end of the novel, thank god. After that I think I will do a couple of short stories and then either work on the Guggenheim preliminary stuff, if that seems warranted, or perhaps go back to “And Shadows Fall.”

 

In her last letter Carmen said that she and Myrtle were going to have a party for you this afternoon, plikka. So I will sort of sit in on it with you from seven o’clock on. I can think of very few things I would not give to be with you today…

 

M

Jacqueline (Johnson) Onslow Ford to Morgans, Fall 1943 -- "So strange this time and place"

 

Dear Rosa and Murray,

So strange this time and space and matter of displacements; there you are far away and yet it is easy to imagine Tacoma, easy and painful imagining fresh butter, bacon, oh glory, rationing indeed, among all the green lawns and clean sidewalks ice-cream sodas and shiny bicycles; would you please lend me a fresh strawberry pecan nut special? did you ever stop to realize how much is wasted in circulars from bond houses alone? Let all talk of the State Dept. continue to fall on deaf I mean deef ears all tangled up as they are with their clean hands rolling snakes disguised as hoops, they (all of them of course) according to this oracle will find themselves in some sinister fairy circles before they eat their lobster thermidor, Rue Thermidor, again.

I do not think I like war stories but I think they have to be written. The accounts of action if Life are some of the best things I've read, especially one about Guadalcanal. I'm amazed at the tact and sensitiveness and good bare style that seems to give you the thing as it is; truth is a meaning too, and probably the one we Americans feel most, its austere sweetness even distempering us for other values that we need perhaps to fatten out our spirits. But I rather hope I shall not read because I hope you will not have to write any of the war experiences of Murray Morgan. We’ve just heard the news of the American bombing of the Roumanian oil fields, 99% of the Nazi supply, someone said. The British owned the wells, but the Americans have no hesitation therefore; what curiously thoughtful faces there must be behind the desks in both capitals sometimes, saying nothing but tapping their teeth with their pencils.

Gordon has been alternately living in Washington and Oregon, on sound and snow-peak, island and beach. To the point where I had to wire Californians Inc. who did not I am sorry to say quite come up to scratch; influence of Hollywood draping a beauty more or less ready for bathing around every scenic marvel including the frozen waterfalls, which meant, as a matter of focus, cutting out the waterfalls. As far as I can tell he has taken to living permanently somewhere in a sound, but whether Washington or Oregon I'm not sure; it's very bright blue in the picture.

Yesterday little grey kitten (who came with a blue bow) Chickadee had three different coloured cats, one an obvious scoundrel with a white, yellow, brown black and grey face, he ought to be drowned but we can't find anyone with the heart to do it. She is fine and not very surprised. One of them looks like her. I've just read that the discovery of a dark planet outside the solar system leads our most responsible astronomer to say there are probably thousands of inhabited planets, all dark, all not doing anything but revolving in a permanent black-out; all dark boats launched on their indefinite length fixed cruise for to see and to admire.

Lake Patzcuaro "That reflecting stillness in which all things are double"  Rosa Morgan photograph