A collection of diaries from the 1870s - 1900, kept by a landlady called Ms Love, who ran a boarding house in Carbondale, Illinois, begin as a robust, domestic account of the residents coming and going: "buckwheat cakes and coffee for breakfast as usual"... laundry arriving by sled in the snow, making peach shortbread and pickled beans. Lodgers take tea and supper together and play music afterwards in the front parlour, usually the weather is storming outside with severe Southern thunder and gales - often it's "too cold to quilt". The diaries are rich in detail and visual, but there's a disappointing lack of bootlegging or drama; all is reassuring bustle, moving furniture about, hanging stag antlers above doorways. Nostalgia is the only creaking detail which foreshadows the darker direction the diaries take on in later years: "Remember 27 years ago tonight, Mother and I stood in the front room and heard the East wind roar over the tree tops".
In 1885 a shift occurs, after Ms Love suffers "strange spells between 3 & 4 AM... a Babel, a tangled brain - could not speak a word... have not had such a spell since I was 12 years old..." From then on the diaries become weighted towards long descriptions of the household cats, as Ms Love starts adopting strays and invalid kittens, who she nurses in "rockers" on the front porch. There is an elliptical quality about the gradual emptying of the boarding house, unremarked by Ms Love, so that the reader, over a hundred years later, is left with a picture of a once bustling house, now overrun by cats crying, limping from room to room, beneath the howling storms of the deep South.
