In August, 1863, she was called to the West by the serious illness of her sister Louisa, which terminated fatally.
... and with her, my pleasant dreams of home dissolve; it was she who said she would make a home for me, wherever I would choose. The earthly outlook is lonelier than before; but I must not yield to selfish regrets. She has gone home, in a sense more real than we often say of the dead. Her whole family had gone before her,--husband and four children had left her one after another. Her heart seemed broken when her youngest son died in the army, last year; she never recovered her strength after that blow. I cannot mourn when I think of that glad reunion of a household in heaven, but I cannot help the great blank that her death and my brother’s have left in my life. These family ties, I find, grow stronger as I grow older.
This prairie life does not now attract me at all. A broad, grand world opens out on every side, but there is no choice in it. You might as well take one level road as another....
With the death of this sister, in reality, did dissolve the “pleasant dreams of a home,” for Miss Larcom never had a home of her own, though she longed for one, and used to delight in speaking of the possibility of having one. “I will build my long-planned home among the mountains,” she used to say, “and my friends shall bivouac with me all summer.” But her life was spent principally in boarding-houses, or in the homes of others. Her resources never permitted her to own the bed on which she slept; however, she did own an old wooden lounge, which was her only bed for years. But she made the best of it, in her usual way; “I like this old couch. I like to be independent of things; there is a charm in Bohemian life.”
On her return to Beverly in 1864, she took a few pupils again, and spent a good deal of time in painting,--even weeds, for she “loved the very driest old stick that had a bit of lichen or moss on it.” She exhausted her friend’s libraries in reading, and received from Mrs. Fields a large valise filled with precious volumes, which she returned only after having read them all. “I like to be here in Beverly with my sister and the children. I think I am more human here than at school.”