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The blue box, soft with age, lived for a long time on the closet’s top shelf. Inside were tattered file folders, threatening to burst at any moment and flood my desk with letters. The earliest ones were on heavy stationary penned in elegant cursive handwriting that’s no longer taught in grade schools. Other letters were typed on onion skin paper in the Elite font of a manual Corona typewriter. They were dated from the 1940s to the early 1970s when penmanship disintegrated into scrawls on scrap paper. No one seemed to use a typewriter anymore. At some point I united them with the contents of my great-grandfather’s wooden cigar box that I keep on the bookcase behind my desk. Inside were my dad’s military medals, the tiny plastic bracelet the hospital placed on my first born son that identified him as ours. An envelope held a fine curl of strawberry blond hair from my second son’s first haircut. A bunch of funeral holy cards for my parents and relatives were scattered among them.
The folders remained on the corner of my desk for several weeks. I would read one every now and then, especially when I was looking for an excuse not to write. The first few were from a mixture of old friends I no longer see or can recall. There were a handful from my best friend in high school written to me when I was away at college. An artist, she painted watercolors on some of them that I hung on the walls of wherever I was living. They end abruptly when we were 22: she overdosed five years later. Some were from several lovers I continue to regret or mercifully can’t remember. My brother’s letter called me “Peaches.” My sister apologized for not writing more; her baby was a lousy sleeper. The one from my mom to my dad refusing to marry him really took me by surprise. He wanted her to accept taking care of his two younger orphaned sisters. She pointed out that, while she loved him and the girls, she had already spent her life as the primary care giver of her fragile mother and feckless brother. She wanted privacy for them as they settled into married life. Three letters from M.F.K. Fisher were sandwiched in. I have no idea now how our correspondence began but she was kind to a girl who was unsure of her talents, advising her to ignore ridiculous critics. My dad gave me similar advice when I complained about an editor at my first job. He believed that the best defense was fortitude and wit.
When my aunt was alive, we spent many hours talking about her past. She and my uncle were in the Foreign Service from 1945 to the early 1980s, stationed in Germany during the cold war and in unstable countries in the Middle and Far East. For a while, the family were sure they were really in the CIA. She wanted me to tell her story, but she was too reticent to reveal anything about their personal experiences. But she must have retained hope because she willed to me two folders of her personal papers. One contained a lifetime of household records and important documents, including their birth and marriage certificates, furniture receipts, and short notes and telegrams from friends.
The other folder was labeled VERY PRIVATE PAPERS. They dated from October to December, 1956, when they were stationed in Egypt. During the Suez Canal Crisis she was evacuated to Rome while my uncle remained in the embassy in Cairo. Among the mundane description of everyday life away from each other, they exchanged graphic intimate fantasies. They had names for every part of their bodies that could possibility be entangled together. Who knew anyone in my family could be so erotic! I read only four before I tied the folder closed.
If I was to write a book based on the letters it would be from a thick file folder that chronicles my dad’s family life when he was stationed in Belgium during World War II. They’re from his favorite sister who took his place holding the family together—their 80-year-old grandfather; a weary, often drunk, father; three high-spirited sisters; and two older brothers in troubled marriages. My aunt’s and uncle’s courtship showed up; it was the cause of many shouting matches with her dad, some that ended with him slapping her. Taken as a whole, her letters are a portrait of a family living through war.
The letters that my husband sent to me before we were married are in a large black box. (He didn’t keep mine.) They include a full-throated affirmation of love, the boredom of looking for his first job after graduation and the thrill of finally landing one; several apologetic responses to my complaints about how infrequently he wrote to me; confusions about details of our engagement and wedding. A haphazard collection of Valentine Day cards from him were a puzzle: why these and not others? Maybe because of his outrageously funny postscripts.
My children’s correspondences were collected in a legal-size envelope probably for additional security. Many were the kind of school art projects that all parents seem to keep: Hearts cut out of red construction paper; holiday wreaths and turkey tails made from their hand prints, crepe paper flowers and poems for Mother’s Day. There are three letters from my oldest son that continue to break my heart: one before his Marine hell week exercises at Fort Lejeune; one from Iraq asking us to write more; the final one from Afghanistan with a list of things he’d like us to send him. His most urgent request were for baby wipes to clean sand off his face and a fake Christmas tree.
I can’t remember the last time I composed or even received a letter on paper. Does anyone write in cursive anymore? Visceral texts, so important to a relationship’s story, are impossibly fleeting but what about emails? Are they safe in the folders I keep on my desktop? What would happen to them if my computer was hacked and crashed? Would I even remember receiving them?
The letters are still on my desk, these voices long silenced scattered about me.
What do I do with them?
Mom’s Recipe for Some Kind of Cake
My mom would occasionally send me recipes written on the back of her short letters. She was a very good cook and I knew her recipes would result in something fine but I couldn’t always decipher her handwriting.
Here is one such example. It seems to be for a cake or possibly a sweet lemony bread. I tried my best to translate it have failed. If you are luckier than me, could you send me your take on it?
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Hmmm....I guess none of my handwritten cards made your box!!! Just yesterday I was going shoeboxes of memories. Had alot of the same feelings also. Back in the boxes and back in the the cedar chest they were in, hoping one day my son will find them them and be amazed!
So heartwarming to read about all the memories, Pat. My in-laws had 17 grandchildren, and had a way of making each one of them feel special, often in handwritten notes or poems in birthday cards, or postcards detailing interesting places they visited. I keep most of these cards in a folder, and read them from time to time, and occasionally dig them out to share with our sons. We very much still feel the love in every word they wrote.