Stella White: June 20, 2015

June 20, 1939.  I was thinking as I crossed the Channel last night of Stella. . . . She was lovely too, in a far vaguer, less perfect way than my mother. She reminded me always of those large white flowers – elder blossom, cow parsley, that one sees in the fields in June.   Perhaps my mother’s laughing nickname – ‘Old Cow’—suggests the cow parsley.  Or again, a white faint moon in a blue sky suggests her. Or those large white roses that have many petals and are semi-transparent.   

“A Sketch of the Past” 
(MOB 95, 97)