# The Story of Mary MacLane/January 16

I feel about forty years old.
Yet I know my feeling is not the feeling of forty years. These are the feelings of miserable, wretched youth.
Every day the atmosphere of a house becomes unbearable, so every day I go out to the sand and barrenness. It is not cold, neither is it mild. It is gloomy.
I sit for two hours on the ground by the side of a pitiably small narrow stream of water. It is not even a natural stream. I dare say it comes from some mine among the hills. But it is well enough that the stream is not natural—when you consider the sand and barrenness. It is singularly appropriate.
And I am singularly appropriate to all of them. It is good, after all, to be appropriate to something—to be in ​touch with something, even sand and barrenness. The sand and barrenness is old—oh, very old. You think of this when you look at it.
What should I do if the earth were made of wood, with a paper sky!
I feel about forty years old.
And again I say I know my feeling is not the feeling of forty years. These are the feelings of miserable, wretched youth.
Still more pitiable than the sand and barrenness and the poor unnatural stream is the dry, warped cemetery where the dry, warped people of Butte bury their dead friends. It is a source of satisfaction to me to walk down to this cemetery and contemplate it, and revel in its utter pitiableness.
"It is more pitiable than I and my sand and barrenness and my poor unnatural stream," I say over and over, and take my comfort.
Its condition is more forlorn than that of a woman young and alone. It is un​kempt. It is choked with dust and stones. The few scattered blades of grass look rather ashamed to be seen growing there. A great many of the headstones are of wood and are in a shameful state of decay. Those that are of stone are still more shameful in their hard brightness.
The dry, warped friends of the dry, warped people of Butte are buried in this dusty, dreary, wind-havocked waste. They are left here and forgotten.
The Devil must rejoice in this graveyard.
And I rejoice with the Devil.
It is something for me to contemplate that is more pitiable than I and my sand and barrenness and my unnatural stream.
I rejoice with the Devil.
The inhabitants of this cemetery are forgotten. I have watched once the burying of a young child. Every day for a fortnight afterward I came back, and I saw the mother of the child there. ​She came and stood by the small new grave. After a few days more she stopped coming.
I knew the woman and went to her house to see her. She was beginning to forget the child. She was beginning to take up again the thread of her life where she had let it go. The thread of her life is involved in the divorces and fights of her neighbors.
Out in the warped graveyard her child is forgotten. And presently the wooden headstone will begin to decay. But the worms will not forget their part. They have eaten the small body by now, and enjoyed it. Always worms enjoy a body to eat.
And also the Devil rejoiced.
And I rejoiced with the Devil.
They are more pitiable, I insist, than I and my sand and barrenness—the mother whose life is involved in divorces and fights, and the worms eating at the child's body, and the wooden headstone which will presently decay.
​And so the Devil and I rejoice.
But no matter how ferociously pitiable is the dried-up graveyard, the sand and barrenness and the sluggish little stream have their own persistent individual damnation. The world is at least so constructed that its treasures may be damned each in a different manner and degree.
I feel about forty years old.
And I know my feeling is not the feeling of forty years. They do not feel any of these things at forty. At forty the fire has long since burned out. When I am forty I shall look back to myself and my feelings at nineteen—and I shall smile.
Or shall I indeed smile?