"this crowded confusing year"

More rain in 1938 meant a slow, steady recovery for Caroline's land and the region as a whole with crops growing again. But she still describes winter and spring as "a blur of almost continuous dust" when she writes to Rose at the end of the year.

Caroline also mentions her enjoyment reading Virginia Woolf's The Years, first published in 1937. "Perhaps I felt a special interest because of the name of the one who seemed to me the central character--Eleanor--and because of its truthfulness in showing how inconculsive life is anyway." Caroline's own daughter Eleanor was grown by this time, and is proudly mentioned in this letter as she has completed her medical training, married, and now bought a house of her own.