Commonplace Book: Across Five Aprils....

Jethro was her youngest child, born in the year of '52, a year in which three of her children died within one week of the dreaded disease they called child's paralysis, a disease which struck the country that year, people said, like the soldiers of Herod.  Ellen knew that she favored her youngest son, that she overlooked shortcomings in Jethro for which her older children had been punished.  It was a weakness of her advancing years, she supposed, but this was the son who had been spared that summer when children all around were dying of the agonizing sickness; it looked as if, somehow, Destiny had marked him.  One didn't talk about such things; the world, she knew, was impatient with women who value their own children too highly.  Ellen kept her silence, but she saw signs of special talents in Jethro, and she watched over him with special tenderness.  - Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt