August 9, 2024. It's the second morning in a row that we awoke to no power, hence, no push-button coffee. The skies are ominous, the color of badly tarnished silver, darkened by the hurricane Debby. Coffee in hand at last (gas stove), I settle on the couch with my phone to look for power company updates. It is too dark to read. I don't feel well anyway. (That story, below, is about why it took me until past Election Day of this year to start writing blogs again.)
Gradually the skies lightened a bit and with a flashlight and candles, I resumed a sorting task I had meant to do years ago. It was perfect for my need to rest a lot on the couch. Coming from parents who had both saved boxes of letters, I, for better or worse, had absorbed the same habit and let new boxes of my own fill up and never went back to sort through them. I didn't know I would find jewels as well as sorrows.
I gathered the dusty cartons and old metal file boxes around me. There were so many containers and my husband and I had so much to do. We were working on clearing out our home and gardens of almost thirty years so we could move. So many heirlooms, so much stuff, lots of junk, and too much of everything. The question of what to do with the letters seemed like a spool of ribbon one drops. It rolls across the floor and as we watch it our minds are already deciding whether to rewind or wad up and discard.
In my current lethargy, I could at least sort, so I started by grouping the letters by year. This whole effort turned into a gift, now a warm memory that feels like loving arms wrapped around me. These particular boxes (I still have more, mostly a lot older, even though we have now moved) ranged from 1996 through 2013.
The first thing I noticed in the flickering candlelight was that the letters slowly petered out between 2005 and 2009, and then settled down to a steady sparser number. In 2000, some printed-out emails began overlapping with typed letters. US usage stats explain this. Home computer ownership went from about 35% in 1996 to 77% in 1910 and kept growing. Texting grew from very little to in the early 2000s to now about two trillion messages a year. Texting became free with most cell phones around 2013. No wonder the candle’s flickering flame revealed the near demise of letters. Holiday cards seemed to hold steady.
Still dark and still sipping my coffee, I got down to reading each one. Soon, my heart was filled with sparked memories, from beaming to mournful with leaps in between. There were forgotten people, some who had written long letters. How could I forget those people? That was humbling. Some letters were signed with only a letter. “T” was one, another was “A.” Even the postmark didn’t always help with figuring out who they might be. Some letters were from foreign countries with beautiful stamps. All had different handwriting. Some beautiful cursive, some barely legible, some printed. Some discussed seemingly memorable events, now forgotten nonetheless.
Cards added their scenes to words, the latter long forgotten details, the former often remembered images: a painting of a moose standing in the middle of a mountain creek sparkling in moonlight, another a tiny card with a delicate rendering of a bird, and so many more. No wonder I hadn’t thrown these away.
I kept going. As for letters signed with a letter, I never did find out who the “T” was. I figured out another alphabetically signed letter by the return address. Finally, the identity of “A” was revealed by a card that had called for a formal signature. Armantine! That unwrapped another whole story and happy memory. Years ago, I had had a phone call from this person related to my work. “A” as her friends and family called her, had a long story and lots of questions for me and understandable complaints about her swimming and music playing being hampered by the illness she called about. She also complained bitterly about her communication difficulties with her friends as they would not use email. I finally asked, “If you don’t mind telling me, how old are you?” “Ninety-eight,” she replied.
I felt compelled to meet this remarkable and feisty woman in person. She lived a couple of hours from me but from time to time I was able to visit when I was travelling in her direction. These visits taught me that one could have strong coffee every morning and a scotch every evening and live to be over ten decades old. I was honored to be invited to her one-hundredth birthday party. She made a grand speech. A lived another year or two. I miss her and her letters and cards.
The sweetest dearest batch of letters was tied with a pretty ribbon. They were from the mother of a childhood friend. We had lost touch over the years. In fact, I felt sure she was no longer living. My husband and I went knocking at the door of her house across the street from where I grew up to see if the occupants knew anything about her.
We were in Birmingham for my fortieth high school reunion. Doug had never seen where I lived as a child. My astonishment when she answered the door and called out my name felt like an opening treasure box. She told us happy stories and shared long ago memories of me and her then little son playing in their home or at their getaway cabin on the Coosa River. Sadly, Doug and I learned that my dear little friend had died from AIDS years before. Burges and I began a correspondence, our letters going back and forth until not long before she died in 2004. By then, she was the only living person who remembered me as a child. I put her letters in a new smaller box, and retied it with the pretty ribbon.
By the time I finished this task it had grown much brighter outside. I thought about the boxes of letters from my children beginning in their childhoods and going into their young adulthood years. I look forward to another time with these. I blew the candles out and turned off the flashlight, a fitting metaphor for our current world without handwritten or typed letters in envelopes with stamps and postage marks. Archival and often full of history not findable elsewhere, their demise is a great loss to the world.
November 2024
March to November 2024. My silence explained. In early March I learned I had breast cancer again. Since then, until just a few weeks ago, it has been a whirlwind of tests, scans, x-rays, surgery, needles and dye, radiation and photographs, cardiac and lung tests, so many blood draws, so many IVs and infusions, lots of poking and prodding, chemotherapy which I flunked just shy of half way through, (my body couldn’t tolerate it), medium-level miserable side effects, varying levels of fatigue and brain fog, post-chemo drugs to try to keep the cancer away, hours of online researching and scheduling appointments, going to appointments, and so much more.
The recurrence of cancer compelled my dear husband and me to go ahead and move into a CCRC (continued care retirement community) a few years earlier than planned. With enormous help from family and friends we managed our down-sizing and moved about two months ago. We are so grateful for all that help, for friends and family bringing food, the good medical care, and to be able to get into our CCRC. Our former home and some family are nearby so the transition and new routine have been relatively easy. I am so happy to feel, at last, good enough to begin writing again.
I miss my mother's long letters! I'm sad that that routine has disappeared from our lives. I too have a large bin of letters, mostly from her, that I saved. Now that I have a spacious storage space in our new condo in Richmond, I plan to eventually organize all my old ephemera. Glad to read your posts again!