When Letters -- on Paper -- Were Everything

Reading a diary from before the Civil War, I am struck by the number of letters the young male diarist tells of regularly writing and receiving. His lawyer brother in New Orleans seems to have written to Silas almost every day, and it was a rare day that Silas did not write to James or to Warren or to one of his sisters back home and perhaps also to the editor of a local newspaper. And all his correspondence was, of course, conducted in longhand (Does anyone still say ‘longhand’? Or was it only necessary to make the distinction when secretaries took dictation in shorthand?), with every cranny of space filled.

I have trouble considering anything a book if the words aren't on paper. Likewise a letter. E-mail messages can be important and precious -- I don't pooh-pooh them. But they are not letters. And a "diary" kept in digital format? Really?

 

Silas did not write in his diary every day, but when he did, it was in addition to letters he had also written that same day. The diary he kept for himself; the letters were to and for others. Way back then, without cell phones or e-mail or so-called social media, letters were the way he and others kept in continuous contact with family and friends. His letters to newspaper editors, less frequent, were a way to voice his opinions publicly, as he also did in amateur debates and public addresses.

The debates in which he participated, like his letters, were as much public entertainment as they were communication. Conversation, reading books, and playing musical instruments were ways to pass a quiet lamplit evening at home in those days, and letter-writing was another way, but Silas also made preparation for a debate or for offering a public address by writing longhand notes in the pages of his diary, another occupation that filled his evening hours and also served as preparation to reaching out to others, near and far. Back then, townsfolk and country people regularly traveled to schoolhouses, village halls, and churches for evenings spent listening to debates, public addresses, and sermons. Yes, even sermons were entertainment in those days, with visiting sermonizers critiqued afterward in depth by audience members -- often as much or more for performance quality as for theology, judging from Silas’s diary.

 

In our time, now the third decade of the 21^st century (can you believe it?), a general “felt need” for handwritten correspondence seems almost to have disappeared. We have public forums for our every thought and deed in social media, the instant gratification of texting (often with almost instant replies), and none of it requires paper or stamps, let alone a trip to the post office. But if letters are classed by collectors as ephemera, what can digital exchanges be called? Even if the storage media are somehow preserved, is there any guarantee it will be readable in future? Whereas I can take in my hands Silas’s diary and the handful of private letters tucked into the diary pages, all written over a century and a half ago, and read them as if they were written yesterday, how many of the thoughts and experiences shared on Facebook will anyone be able to visit a century and a half from now?

As thrilling as it is for me to time-travel via Silas’s diary, it is just as thrilling or more so to find a letter in my own mailbox, written to me by a sister or a friend, bearing postage and return address and cancellation that tell of its journey and the thought that went into someone caring enough to reach out to me over hundreds of miles. I can tear the envelope open in haste or slit it carefully with a knife, read the letter immediately or tuck it away and carry it with me to enjoy later – or I can do both, reading it eagerly at once and folding it away to read again an hour later, beginning already to form in my mind the reply that will eventually becomposed and sent off, a personal, intimate, committed-to-paper, taken-time-to-write missive sent to one person alone -- although perhaps to be shared with a partner or friend at the other end, too, because once the letter reaches its destination it belongs to the recipient. The gift has been given.

Then there are the enclosures that letters may contain, as delightful in their way as the letters themselves. This old bit of "ephemera" captured my attention, and I wish I still had new snapshots every week to send with my own letters. Sadly, our photographs are another thing we rarely commit to paper any more.

The biggest problem for me with Sundays is that there is not even the possibility of finding a letter in the mailbox. Monday’s return to mundane, everyday life does not trouble me at all, because the postal carrier may bring me news and thoughts from someone I love.

 

One friend back in northern Michigan who shares my enthusiasm for written correspondence is doing more than writing letters: she has started a movement for slow correspondence called Leelanau Letter Writers. You don’t have to live in Leelanau County, Michigan, to join. There are no membership fees, no meetings. 

You may also elect to join the LLW pen pal group, but you don’t even have to do that. Just let it be your inspiration to write and mail letters. Will you write about what’s really on your mind? What will that be? You need share that only with your recipient. It's that personal. Who will receive the next letter you write? No need to tell me -- just write and send that letter. On paper.

 

The Perfect Moment Is a Soap Bubble

A year has gone by already!

Our little great-grandsons are normal, healthy, active children and love to run after soap bubbles floating on the breeze. This photo, though, is over a year old. The bubbles in the picture are long gone, the boys much grown, talking up a storm, running even faster this year.

Like the realization of happiness, the experience of perfection is ephemeral but no less precious for its will-o’-the-wisp nature. I started thinking about this in the wee hours of the morning, lying awake listening to my partner, the Artist, breathing regularly in his sleep beside me and our dog, our darling old Sarah, breathing quietly on the floor next to our bed, all of us alive and safe and together in the dark. We are aging, all three of us but Sarah fastest of all (although we assume she is oblivious to the fact), and so awareness of our time together is a frequent topic of conversation these days. On Labor Day, I gave Sarah a bath, then washed my hair, and afterward the two of us (dog and I) spent much of the remaining afternoon outdoors, relaxing in the sun while the Artist worked nearby and came and went. The warmth and light of the day were like a benediction. Later the whole pack rode in the car up to Christmas Cove to watch Lake Michigan waves crash against the shore. 

Day arrives

Waves crash

Day departs

There have been many lovely moments in recent months, many light-filled, memorable, heart-stopping scenes along life’s way. There was that sandhill crane on the back road one morning and what was probably a once-in-a-lifetime sighting of a fisher right in my own yard. There were wonderful hours of wandering back roads of woods and waters in Barry County with my son last spring. The annual but never dull parade of flowers from trillium and marsh marigold to Joe-Pyeweed and goldenrod. Sunrises, sunsets, clouds, precious visits to mares with this year’s adorable foals, peaceful evenings on the porch, and the sight of a late friend’s face in her daughter’s smile. 

Whenever I’m driving to Northport or home at the end of the day, my mind is usually perusing a mental calendar and working down a lengthy to-do list. When I stop, however, and turn off the engine and get out of the car, if only long enough to frame one particular photograph but especially when Sarah and I can take our time, if only for ten minutes of rambling, then my breath slows and deepens, my mind clears, and my senses awake to the nuances of my surroundings. 

Nothing lasts forever

As I reflect on moments of awareness and happiness, I continue to think also of the nature of the soap bubble. The way it drifts and wobbles and catches the light and lets us see the world through it. The way we can sometimes let one alight on our skin for a moment or two. The inevitable pop! If you are the kind of person who wants all the scientific facts, you may want to follow this link and read about evaporation and surface tension. If you’re more like me and see metaphors everywhere you look, you will simply rejoice in the fragile, momentary loveliness, maybe sigh over its disappearance but, still, be glad you were there to see it, very glad you had your eyes open.

Save Your Kids the Trouble?

I stacked boxes on front porch

My mother was not a hoarder, by any stretch of the definition, but she did accumulate a lot of stuff in her home of 68 years. Three children grew up there. Also, my mother loved clothes and jewelry and knick-knacks and holiday decorations. She was a reader — books, newspapers, magazines. (No, she did not stockpile the old newspapers and magazines: those were recycled, as were many of the books that didn’t come from the library.) Photographs, clippings, old family-designed and -crafted holiday cards, and other souvenir mementos meant a lot to her, too. So when she died recently, my sisters and I had a lot of sorting to do, and we haven’t finished the job yet. Not everything that feels significant during grieving is personal, as I wrote in my last post, but a lot of it really, really is.

And there were some wonderful, heartwarming surprises awaiting us! One priceless treasure was a scrapbook our mother had put together in the middle 1940s, when she and our father were dating, then became engaged, and eventually married in Chicago and embarked on their new life together in Aberdeen, South Dakota. My sisters and I had never seen this scrapbook before. It was hidden away (why hidden? simply forgotten?) on the back of a top shelf. Along with saved slips of telephone messages and theatre programs and tickets, our mother had written notes on the pages to which the souvenirs were pasted. 

On the first page of the scrapbook is a theatre program from early 1946. My father (not yet my father) had come by train from South Dakota (where he led a survey crew for the Milwaukee Road) to Ohio to visit his father and stepmother in Columbus and stopped in Springfield on his way. In Springfield he and my mother (not yet my mother) attended a play. There is a note left at my mother’s office (she worked as a secretary after high school graduation; the college scholarship she was awarded would have paid half her tuition, but her parents could not afford the remainder) saying that “Mrs. Gilbert” had called. That would have been my father’s stepmother in Columbus. Subsequently my mother made a trip out to South Dakota to see my father, and they became engaged. We girls did know about the trip and the engagement. As my mother said, she knew she’d better come home with a ring after traveling so far to visit this man!

A letter dated August 23, 1946 (not pasted into the book), from the woman we always called Auntie Grace, our mother’s best friend and roommate before Grace and Gene were married in 1945, was signed “‘Becky,'” Gene & the girls,” her maiden name being (I think) Becker, and she and Gene were married in August of the previous year, so the twins must have come along right away. “Just a year ago today you arrived in Kazoo for my wedding. Seems like years have passed since then!” She writes in reply to Nora’s news that she and Lloyd are engaged to be married. “Believe it or not I wasn’t even surprised — just ever so happy for you. I guess I’ve sort of known all along that “this was it.” It just sounded “right” for some reason or other. I called Gene right away and when I said “Nora’s engaged!” he just said “Yes” — he’d expected it too.” Grace/'Becky' hopes Lloyd will be transferred from Aberdeen, South Dakota, to Chicago so the two couples will live closer to each other. That didn’t happen, but in 1950 my father changed jobs and went to work for a smaller railroad (from the Milwaukee Road to the Elgin, Joliet, & Eastern), and he and my mother and I moved to Joliet, 45 miles southwest of Chicago, where my two sisters were born. 

newspaper wedding story and wedding corsage

On the page with the newspaper story of their wedding, with my mother (not yet my mother) looking radiant and beautiful, she had written by hand on the now-brittle page, “My lovely double white orchid corsage — many envious glances were directed at this!!” (My mother was the queen of exclamation marks all her life!) Wedding luncheon at the Blackhawk Hotel in Chicago: Grace and Gene were there in Chicago for the wedding, along with my mother’s mother and Phil Mueller, best man. Who was Phil Mueller? HIs name is unfamiliar to me. 

“On Decoration Day [this would have been 1947] we moved into Ted & Anne Streibel's while they were out of town for the summer, Ted on the Sperry Car, & Anne & children visiting. August was a terrifically hot month — and Dr. King says I’m right about being pregnant! On one of the cooler evenings we took in our first rodeo — Edna joined us (Bob in Madison now).” She was pregnant with me — barely — and so in a sense my parents’ “first rodeo” was mine, too, as I attended in utero.

Birth announcements, holiday letters, theatre programs, newspaper clippings — she saved everything, but there is nothing more pasted into the scrapbook after the first childless Aberdeen days. Once the first baby came along and then the move to Joliet, Illinois, and, in time, two more babies, my mother’s paper mementos remained loose, in boxes and envelopes. For example, as a senior in high school, I received a National Merit letter of commendation, along with five others in my class. Two or three were awarded scholarships, but our superintendent is quoted in a newspaper article as saying he is proud of all of us. (One of the other letter recipients, a boy from my homeroom, I learn died two years ago. How is that possible?) Ephemera, all of it.

Her daughters only saw our mother’s scrapbook after she died, when one daughter discovered it high in a bedroom cupboard. Had she forgotten she had it? What if my mother had decided to clean out those cupboards and “get rid” of all that old stuff, “to save her kids the trouble”? I shudder to think of what we would have missed!

Not all objects remaining in the family home are equally precious, but each speaks to me of my mother: 

Child scribbles -- mine? -- in an old looseleaf cookbook

Battered box heavy with coins to be donated to church ladies' circle

Souvenir Leelanau shirt from July visit

Cast iron skillet perfect for cooking a single egg

A grade school class picture, she 2nd from L in 2nd row

With her brother, stepfather, mother, and sister

Not stylish, but warm -- and she loved it!

Also, going through these things together has been and continues to be an important grieving and bonding experience for my sisters and me. Our mother’s death was unexpected. I thought she would live to be 110. She was fine only the day before she went to sleep for the last time. In one way, you might say it’s “trouble” or “a lot of work” to go through her things, and so it is, but that’s not the whole story. These tasks are valuable to her children in their mourning process.

Sister Deborah

Sister Bettie