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In this second volume of four journals, Madeleine L'Engle pens, "this is our fourth four-generation summer." This statement is truly remarkable if one takes a moment to ponder it. The journal's focus is on L'Engle's mother, a proud Great-Grandmother who is spending her final summer on earth. A significant amount of time is dedicated to rediscovering her mother's life. L'Engle describes her mother's adventures "in the days before planes [when] she traveled by camel and donkey; she strode casually through a world which is gone and which [L'Engle] will never see except through her eyes." L'Engle writes about the slow loss of her mother as she declines. The woman she once knew has become a stranger, "the light behind her face is no longer there." She vividly describes how "up until a few years ago she was an example of a woman who had lived life fully, and who grows yearly more beautiful with age." The process of her mother's decline leaves her with complex emotions. She is "furious with Mother for not being my mother, and I am filled with an aching tenderness I have never known before." The transition to mothering one's own mother and facing up to one's own mortality is exquisitely painful. L'Engle writes, "There is something atavistic in us which resents, rejects, this reversal of roles. I want my mother to be my mother. And she is not. Not anymore. Not ever again." In contrast, babies and animals accept and affirm Great-Grandmother exactly as she is, and she can find peace with them. L'Engle seems to find some measure of peace for herself through rest and sleep. She writes, "I still treasure the time before sleep comes, when I move into the shallows before plunging down into deep waters; and the minutes before I surface into the daylight and the routine of the day, when I swim slowly up from sleep and dreams, still partly in that strange, underwater world where I know things which my conscious mind is not able to comprehend."
