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“I think almost the last straw here though is the hairdresser, a nice big hearty Maine girl who asks me questions I don’t even know the answers to. She told me: 1, that my hair ‘don’t feel like hair at all.’ 2, I was turning gray practically ‘under her eyes.’ And when I’d said yes, I was an orphan, she said ‘Kind of awful, ain’t it, ploughing through life alone.’ So now I can’t walk downstairs in the morning or upstairs at night without feeling like I’m ploughing. There’s no place like New England.”

letter to Robert Lowell, dated Sunday, July 11, 1948, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 42-43.
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