July 23, 2008
Postcards from the Past
Since my grandmother's passing in May, I get regular mail from my mother. Sometimes the packages are big; sometimes they're little padded mailers that only weigh a few ounces. But the contents are always the same.
It seems that my grandmother kept a lot of things. Silly pieces of paper like recipes clipped from Good Housekeeping and old Dear Abby columns. But she also kept every card, letter or note she recieved from her children and grandchildren. It's a remarkable collection, made more remarkable by the fact that she was mother to 7 and grandmother to 17.
In cleaning out her hosue, my mother and her sisters went through them all, making piles for the appropriate decendents, but also reading a few. Stoppping to laugh, to cry, to discover something perhaps they never knew.
The first package I received contained not only my high school graduation announcement, but also my mother's. Also held within was an invitation to my parent's wedding and a napkin. "Dick & Judy - March 20, 1965" in gold foil letters. I stood in our kitchen, tears streaming down my face as I showed Aaron. "Look, look," I said. "This was real. This happened."
Last night I laid in bed reading cards sent to my grandparents from my mom. Birthday cards, anniversary cards, mother's day and father's day cards. Many of them signed, "Your Texas daughter." I'd read the date and figure out how old I was, if I was even born yet. In one letter, scrawled in marker on construction paper, my mom wrote about the baby growing inside her and how my dad was fixing up the nursery in their little New Orleans apartment. There were postcards sent from Utah and San Francisco, and I imagined my mother, much younger than I am now, seeing the world with her young eyes, this small town Ohio farm girl, figuring out that city on the bay.
Our children won't have this, I told him. They won't get to read my messages to my mother about what you cooked for dinner and what we are going to do on Saturday. Banal, silly details that when viewed forty years later paint a picture of people you never got to know.
It seemed that when I was a child, I liked to sign my full name, as if my grandmother wouldn't have known who this person was sending her a Mother's Day card. I wrote about slumber parties and how I couldn't wait for her to visit. On the back of many of the cards my grandmother made notes. "My precious children," she'd write. On the back of a note my mom left after our annual visit to Ohio, my grandmother wrote how her beautiful daughter Judy always left the sweetest notes and was always so grateful.
But what stands out to me in my readings is my mother's heart. Even on the cards dated 1988 or 1990, years when she was single and working and trying to raise two insubordinate teenagers, she was cheerful. Joyful. Happy. She wrote encouraging notes to her parents, urging them to take care of one another. To write. To love each other. She wrote with a grateful hand, always full of thanks and praise for them. Many times her letters praised God and, as if it wasn't obvious before, it's obvious upon reading just a few that I am not made of the same mettle as she.
These letters are a gift. I'm not sure if that was her intention in keeping them all; probably not. I think she kept them because she loved her family, and it gave her pleasure to go back and read their words. To know what was going on in their lives and to know that no matter where in the world, they remembered her.
My mom said there were sad letters too. Things that were hard to read. Those they got rid of, she told me. Too hurtful to dredge up some memories, she said, especially now that so many of the players have passed on. What would be the point?
Our lives are so temporary, gone in instants. If we lose the tether to our families, to our histories, to the things that keep us tied together, we lose everything. And maybe that's why she kept them. To remember us remembering her.
Posted by hannah at 02:50 PM
