Dear Cyndy,

My literary experience with the term "color of law" 
dates from the civil rights struggles in the South,
where the authorities developed great expertise at
depriving blacks of their civil rights "under color
of law".

As soon as I had come back with the groceries and
unloaded the car, I tackled your essays. The envelope
may have taken 8 days to get to me; but what it contained
took seventy years. For all that, the envelope was so
securely sealed that the dull knife which I have recently
been using to open new reams of printer paper required
an inordinately long time to incise the uncooperative
plastic tape with which you had sealed the secrets.
I was reminded of the squirrel whose struggles with
the stony, inedible shell I recently alluded to,
was reminded also of the first chapter of Kierkegaard's
Either Or, where the Papirer that tell it all are trapped
in the jammed drawer of an old-fashioned desk that the
impatient traveler demolishes for access to the cash
that he needs for his journey.  Both essays I find very
powerful, especially the one about The Farm.
Would you tell me in what year you wrote it?
As I continued to read, page after page, I felt more
and more as if I myself had had no childhood at all,
and I began to ask myself whether if I read it and reread
it often enough so that I learned it by heart, it might
be possible for me even at this advanced age, to acquire
a childhood as it were by proxy, vicariously. We shall see.
I had initially intended to take your essays with me on
the Nantucket trip tomorrow and reread them, and think
about them on the boat going over and coming back, -
but on second consideration I'll leave them here, so as
not to have the worry of misplacing them or losing them
on the boat. One minor correction: in 1939 the nearest
stop to Canaan of the NY Central train to North Adams
was not at Chatham but at East Chatham.

I've recently had some e-mail correspondence with the
Nantucket lawyer, Kimberly Saillant. I have the impression
even though she won that last round, she's a little bit
shook up, in part perhaps embarrassed because failing to
file a motion to intervene was such a blatant procedural error,
which might make her liable for legal malpractice, - even though
if her case is lost, other causes would be more decisive.
In any event, viewed objectively at this juncture, Nantucket
has little if anything to gain by winning the case; and
the lawyer's fees must be galling to the native islanders,
some of whom still make their living by scalloping.
I'll forward copies of the current correspondence to you,
and let you draw your own conclusions.

Tomorrow morning at 6:30 a.m., it's off to Hyannis and
Nantucket; the 5:30 p.m. boat would get us back by 10 p.m.
the 8:30 boat, three hours later.

You be good, both to yourself and to Ned, and if possible,
stay well.

Jochen