“The beds would not get made”

Willa Cather, from a letter to her lifelong friend Irene Miner Weisz, October 22, 1945. Cather’s brother Roscoe had died the month before:

Now I don’t care about writing any more books. Now I know that nothing really matters to us but the people we love.

Of course, if we realized that when we are young, and just sat down and loved each other, the beds would not get made and very little of the world’s work would ever get done.

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)