Our beloved mother has, as you will discover, made an effort to dissuade you from going still father from her and also to incline you to come if possible and help to make the few remaining months or years she and her aged "husband" may have to live as free from care and anxiety and replite with filial love and affection as circumstances will admit. But when I recollect the many miles interspirsed with broad waters, towering mountains, and deep and lonely valleys that intervene, I hardly dare expect her fervent wish will ever be realised.
I do not wonder at her solicitude for they have already seen many years and the frailties of their natures seen to appear more and more visable. Pa at a raising a few days since, was struck by a stack of falling timber, fell to the ground and taken up for dead! But after a few minutes, animation returned and he has now so far recovered as to be able to ride and walk about and do some light work, but I think it is hardly possible that he will ever fully recover the use of his limbs. And mother seems to have verged with increased rapidity to the debility of a child. The last six months she has become so timersome [sic] as to be unwilling or afraid to be left alone a single minute, ever in the day time.
This circumstance under the present condition and disposition of family, requires more strict attention than Electa is able to bestow, and hence the reason, as she observes, they are obliged to hire. Allen lives with them yet, and our folks tell him he ought to get married and fetch his wife home to take care of the old people, but we have no prelude to such an event.
If the past migh be relied on as a sure index of the purposes of God developements of his "providence for the future' we might anticipate your way soon clear to come and requite the kind offices of your fond parents. But also you may well say how grevious the price to free my hands from administering to the necessities of my dear ones here and give me opportunity to administer to dear ones younder! But I must drop this subject and say we are well as a family at present and favored wwith many other blessings. They all seem willing to forgo the ways of reciprocating your kind offices in letter writing or to leave them exclusively to mother and myself. And Electa in particular says she cannot write. Yours of the 6th Sept. has been read.
J. R. Osborn
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