elisabeth joyce

I’m a professor of English Literature. Given the demands of my workload during the school year, I conduct most of my research over the summer while at Lake George. This means that while I’d often rather be out in or on the water, I am inside at work, but because of Paula Hartz, even though I am not outside having fun, I am replenished by the view of the lake outside the window in front of my desk. This was the view that Paula had while she, too, worked over the summers, and that she passed on to us.

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Paula wrote textbooks of various kinds. She wrote multiple books to explain various religions, such as Baha’i, Zoroastrianism, Shinto and Daoism. She also ghost wrote a book by Don Sloan called Abortion: A Doctor’s Perspective/ A Woman’s Dilemma. She had inherited her parents’ house on Pudding Lane, and she had an apartment on the upper west side of New York at around 96th Street. She was an only child, and she never married. I never met him, but from what I hear, her father was quite domineering. Her mother was a very sweet person who could upholster furniture and make watercolor paintings. Paula went to college at Middlebury College and received their Alumni Plaque Award in 2000. Her main interests were in wildflowers and singing. When I knew her, she would spend every weekend in New Jersey taking care of her mother and singing in the choir at the Reformed Church of Highland Park.

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I don’t remember how I got to know Paula. Since she was close friends with Joan and Blackie, she would come over to the family dock, so it must have been there. I also am not sure what drew her to me. Perhaps it was our common interest in English, which is what I think she studied at college. Perhaps she saw in Jim and me people who shared her cultural interests.  Perhaps she just liked me.  All that I can say is that in her quiet way, she was very good to me.

A couple of summers her choir group traveled in Europe, so she invited us to stay for a week each time at her summer house. One of those weeks was very rainy and my children were small. I remember making cupcakes with very elaborate decorations and a break in the rain allowing us a grand adventure over to Pudding Island for a picnic that lasted about ten minutes before the ants drove us away.

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She also invited us to stay in her New York apartment weekends when she was visiting her mother in New Jersey. This opportunity was particularly lovely for us when Cyrus was a baby, so that we could have a few days to go to museums, making the long drives on either end worth the time.

When we moved to Edinboro, I was an adjunct faculty member with two small children. It was a very difficult adjustment for me to move from a city to a town of 7000, where there was no daycare for children under twelve months old, and to a work situation that was uncertain from semester to semester. However, email had been developed, and Paula, like me, was an early adopter. She was endless comfort and support to me during those first years.

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Paula suffered for many years from the cancer that finally killed her. When she was in her last days, I drove to New Jersey, wearing a shirt that she had gifted me. It was too late for her to be herself, but she recognized the shirt, so I felt a final connection. While Paula is now gone, we still feel strong connections with her, most evident in her grave memorial marker on our lawn and her watercolors and photographs of wildflowers on our walls. When May arrives, and the Lady’s Slippers on the waterfront are blooming, Paula’s spirit and legacy endures. When I work in the summer, I am grateful to Paula for giving me this replenishing space for my own summer labors.

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