The legacy of letters
by Stephanie Piper
I envy savers. I'm not talking fat bankbooks here. I mean people who still have their old Brownie uniforms and their junior prom corsages and their children's kindergarten paintings. They have nostalgia at their fingertips. They have Memory Lane on demand.
They have very large attics.
Eleven moves in three decades have cut my own relics-of-the-past inventory to a minimum. But there is one treasure at which I draw the line.
It's a shabby cardboard box that teeters on the top shelf of my closet. Marked "Do Not Discard," it has survived United Van Lines and any number of manic spring cleanings. After my husband and the dog, it is the one thing I would drag from the house in a fire.
The box overflows with letters. My middle son's epistles from camp ("My horses name today was Ace. He was pretty slow...") spill over love notes from the college senior who would become my life's companion. A letter from the Babies Alumni of New York Hospital invites my last baby (now 27) to join their ranks. A birthday card from my eldest tells me that I'm "the apple crisp in the TV dinner of life."
It's a chronicle told in changing addresses and rising postal rates, handwritten glimpses of small celebrations, meetings and partings. It is the history of my life, tucked into stamped envelopes.
"We had the best time ever with you this Easter," wrote my father-in-law in 1979, when we lived on Willow Road in Winnetka, Illinois, and we thought our parents were immortal.
"I was delighted to see you happily settled in such lovely surroundings," wrote my grandmother to the same address, back when stamps were 13 cents and she, a spry 80, still hopped on planes at the drop of an invitation.
My mother's voice comes to me in three thin airmail pages, dated Rome, 1954.
"Today we went to the Trevi Fountain and threw coins in for you," she wrote, "so you'll get to come to this wonderful city." She must have written other letters to me, but this is the one I saved. "I found two little Italian dolls, so you'll really have a collection. We'll put up shelves in your room for the French ones and these..."
Forty-seven years later, that letter still pulls at my heart. I have albums full of pictures, framed portraits, slides. But when I need to find my mother, I dig through the cardboard box.
Nowadays, I save my family e-mail. It's stored on disks and safe, I guess, from any computer Armageddon. But the box remains on my closet shelf, fraying at the edges.
I should probably sort the contents and arrange things in chronological order. I should probably find another, sturdier container for these bits and pieces of the past. Probably, I won't. Time is telescoped in this cardboard archive. The stories blend, a child's careful printing beside my mother's backhand slant. It's worth saving.
July 12, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 28
© 2001 Metro Pulse
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