I love writing letters and getting mail. I suspect everyone loves letters, but I have two special reasons, my Great Grandmothers, one on my father’s side and one on my mother’s.
When I was a little girl, occasionally I visited my father’s grandmother in the company of one or two of her younger daughters. Grandmother had diabetes and was house-bound (as we said then) with “foot trouble”. For many years, Grandmother lived with her oldest daughter, Inez, and Inez’s husband. I always thought Inez was beautiful and regal-looking with her coronet of soft, gray hair braided around the top of her head. Grandmother was as fastidious about her appearance as her daughter. I remember her face was deeply wrinkled and her nose had grown hawk-like with her advanced years. Grandmother’s hair was always neat and restrained in a bun. She smelled of Nozema skin cream and a perfume I can’t identify. Although she was mostly confined to her bed or the chair in her room due to her inability to walk more than a few steps, she always wore a crisp cotton dress, sometimes with a shawl, in case visitors dropped by.
Television hadn’t advanced to their home, but I remember Aunt Inez’s foot-pump organ that I was actually allowed to try. They listened to the radio. The newspaper was very important to everyone in the household and Grandmother read it thoroughly. She had a special mission. Every Sunday afternoon she cut two cartoons from the newspaper and, along with a stick of Juicy Fruit gum, enclosed them in envelopes for my brother and me. She sent a letter to us every week from as far back as I can remember until she died. How I loved her!
The other grandmother was my mother’s, on her father’s side. She visited us even though her son (my grandfather) and my grandmother were divorced. I think of her as my “Summer Grandma” because she visited us while we were out of school. She had given up her own home and spent the year traveling between her children and their families. She sang songs to me and my siblings…songs from before 1900! She did the “finger work” on the dresses my mother made for me, getting ready for school each year. Grandma’s stitches were perfect, with exact spacing and tension.
I can see Grandma now: a tiny woman with the slightly stooped posture. She often wore simple, dark dresses with maybe a bit of lace at the collar, a flat black hat on her gray head and sensible shoes. She knew herbs and plants…cures…. and I remember walking with her as she absently stroked the plants near the sidewalk, as if she was patting the hand of a friend. Sometimes our walks took us to town when she wanted to shop for the handkerchiefs and bandanas she placed in letters to relatives on their birthdays. She had a huge correspondence. It seemed hardly a day passed when our mailbox wasn’t filled with letters coming to her or a stack of them going out. She always wrote on a lined pad and, with her writing, kept the entire family caught up on news. She lived until she was 93, I believe. For a short while, we were five generations, and we all still miss her.
I used to write a lot of letters and notes to relatives and friends. I slowed down quite a bit when I broke my wrist and some of those little bones in my hand. My handwriting was never flawless but, believe me, it’s not great now. Writing on the computer is much more legible. Still, I miss my fountain pens! Thanks to DH, I have a new one that is wonderful, but it hasn’t worked a miracle on my penmanship.
If you are interested in letterwriting, here’s a site that has some wonderful links
http://www.wendy.com/letterwriting/
And here’s a poem:
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Tags: letter-writing
