From Carmel, words and images that reassure

Thank you for Barbara King’s wonderful article (“A Place Where Nature Takes You by the Hand,” Oct. 9) about a place, a poet and a dog who are all held very dear in my heart.

I never had the pleasure of meeting Robinson Jeffers’ bulldog, Haig, although I feel I know him from having read the poem in which he is the subject-narrator so many times.

My husband first read it to me on the beach in Carmel many years ago. I was crying by the time he finished. My husband passed away five years ago and we read “The House Dog’s Grave” at his memorial service. What a wonderful tribute to the immortal power of love. I’m reminded of a deeply moving sentence from Thornton Wilder’s “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”:

“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

Heidi Mastrogiovanni

West Hollywood

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How wonderful to have Barbara King’s piece on the Jeffers home. When I moved to the Monterey area many years ago, the first friends I met there were the Jefferses. Little did I know just how lucky I was to be shown around by Robinson Jeffers’ grandson, Donnan, seeing this wondrous place with and through the eyes of a family that had complete takes on it all -- playing Scrabble, creating our own words in a place where words were so much a part of the magic.

Charles Sinclair

Silver Lake