Crumbling is not an instant’s Act

Cari came up to visit last weekend and we had a great time relaxing, eating cider doughnuts, going for a long run around the reservoir, and carving Calvin the pumpkin! We also had a little adventure. Cari wanted to see Emily Dickinson's home (now a museum), so we stopped in for a tour before she had to get on the bus. We wanted to do a 1:30 tour, but we got there and it was sold out to an extra large group, so we took the 2pm instead. The tour begins downstairs. I've been on it before, so I was looking around the room more carefully than I have on other visits, and I happened to notice the ceiling had some major cracks. We continued on through the rest of the first floor, and then up to the second. A major section of the tour is in the bedroom where Emily Dickinson wrote all her poetry. Our small group had gathered in the room, all along one wall (most of the room is roped off to display her things), and was just settling in to listen to the tour guide. Suddenly there was a strange noise from downstairs...a thud. And then another thud; it sounded like books falling. And then there was a huge crash and crunching noises. It very quickly became clear that something huge was falling, so we all ran downstairs, to discover the ceiling of the room right below the room we were standing in had collapsed! The air was full of dust and god only knows what else, and the entire ceiling had peeled away from the beams. The tour was quickly disbanded (luckily, no one was in the room and no one was hurt) and Cari and I left to catch her bus.

You can read the official letter, with dramatic pictures, from the Museum, and read a report in the NY Times. There's still no word on why exactly it happened, although I can't help but wonder if the extremely large tour group ahead of us played a role...

Here's a poem by Emily that seems apropos (number 997)

Crumbling is not an instant's Act
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation's processes
Are organized Decays.

'Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul
A Cuticle of Dust
A Borer in the Axis
An Elemental Rust --

Ruin is formal -- Devil's work
Consecutive and slow --
Fail in an instant, no man did
Slipping -- is Crash's law.