December 9, 1959

A reminder that today is the anniversary of Ted and Sylvia Plath Hughes's departure from the U.S. to England on the U.S.S. United States. The above was a sticker or tag for outbound boxes or luggage. Aurelia Plath kept this particular tag and it's in the Plath Family Papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, opened for research this past December 3.

Aurelia liked to annotate. Sometimes her annotations are helpful or revealing, but this "Dec 1959" annotation up top puts me in mind of a brain floating around without a brain stem. Or a little cloud on a blue horizon. But who knows she felt remembering her daughter, alive?

Sylvia was optimistic although the move was risky, especially for her, because she was leaving her network/safety net of friends, relatives, well-wishers, the psychiatrist she trusted, and her native country: almost everything. Yet on that December 9 she was looking forward, not back. In her journal she'd written, "I really want this." [1]

[1] Journals, 20 January 1959.