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Erie, Pa., 
Sunday, Nov. 27, '38.
A dark snowy day and am spending it indoors except for a sally to clear the side walk. Winter seems to have set in for fair and not being used to it, it is rather depressing. Relations with Mother have been more and more strained lately. The pattern is the same as it always has been but I must say, it all is like a weight on me, this constant friction. Try as I will, I can't seem to get around it. Mother wonders why I wont sit down with "like we used to." The answer is that I do and when I do, it inevitably ends in some sort of a wrangle. We seem to be drawn into it like an inevitable vortex. And so I dread to be alone with Mother but I can't tell her so. I have been through these arguments and discussions so many times. I can anticipate her talk almost to the word. I can see exactly what points she will pick up in our conversation, Willie's, the children's, to make something of. 90% of the time we are alone together, we are discussing something which may be all the way from just vaguely unpleasant to a heated argument or denunciation by Mother of someone in the family or something we are doing. I am unhappy over it all and Mother is. But I realize it is a common situation. If I allowed it to, I could be completely broken up by it, but I know that is not sensible. So I try to keep going and by compromise and ignoring certain things, keep some semblance of peace in the family. But it is a depressing situation, clouding many of the things we do. We can almost never go out without being made to feel guilty, not by what Mother says but by what she doesn't say, the way she looks and acts. There is nothing so well designed to knock an evening in the head before it even gets started. Sometimes it seems as though we can't get the simplest sort of thing settled without a tedious, sometimes very unpleasant argument. The trouble, I suppose, is that Mother is not well and this heart trouble makes her extremely nervous. I wish I could be more patient about all this but sometimes it gets me so, I feel like screaming or getting drunk.

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