The Album

About the Book

Rosellyn Elizabeth Snowden was born during the Civil War time while her father was far away fighting for the North. He came home exhausted and near dying. Rosellyn´s only memories of him being fuzzy ones of loving arms, soft blankets and romantic fairy tales, then finally as a pale stranger on his deathbed. A sickly child, she was sent off to her grandfather´s farm, where she lived a happy, much loved childhood, playing with a neighbor girl, Sally, who was always ready to follow Rosellyn´s lead, and was to become a lifelong friend and confidante. The fresh air, sunshine and good food, loving grandparents, let Rosellyn grow up into a healthy young Victorian lady.

Rosellyn´s life is recaptured as she browses the treasured autograph album given her by her mother on her sixteenth birthday. Each of the flowery verses in the elaborate scrolled handwriting of the period not only seem to fit the character of the person, but bring memories more real than the present as she reads them.

Her widowed mother turned her skill at needlework into a vocation earning enough to support the two of them, and Rosellyn was brought home to her mother again, where she assisted with the sewing tasks and enjoyed life in a town, with school, her loving Aunt Sophia´s nearby family and her piano lessons, where she met the handsome, aloof young Gordon, who was to be her lifelong love. Her old friend, Sally, moves to town as well, living with Rosellyn and her mother, while the two girls complete their schooling.

The two of them are accepted in teaching positions in the local school immediately after finishing their twelfth year, and spend many happy hours with this, and with their schoolteacher friends, forming a group of primarily very young women. They meet weekly, ostensibly to discuss their work, while they mainly visit, gossip and enjoy the company of the young men who include themselves in their group.

While her friends marry, one after another, to become wives and mothers, full of stories of their offspring and the joys of matrimony, Rosellyn can see none but the dashing Gordon who seems in no rush to change his way of life. How her life progresses, how her elusive dreams, steadfast love, achievements and disappointments color her life and the culmination of her hopes makes absorbing reading.

About the Author

Diane Thompson Bell has lived in the deserts of Arizona for the past fifty-five years, now residing in historic Jerome, where she has lived for twenty-five years. She retired from a position of Postmaster there, and now occupies her time with her writing, which she began at age sixty-nine, and her love of art, favoring the medium of colored pencil for her work. A member of the local artists' co-op group, she divides her time between those two interests. Born in Paulding, Ohio in 1929, she retains clear memories of the area in which the book is placed. Her grandmother, stricken by an illness, which prevented much communication, left her autograph album, as well as a photograph album and a scant few pages of her diary, to the author. It is from this flowery little book that all the verses are taken, the long forgotten writers fleshed out by the author's ample imagination.