Letters

When my parents visited this past weekend, they brought us loads of things: a ham, Kroger's cottage cheese (it's the best. truly.), a sharp trowel, four buckets of horse manure from the farm for our small garden, a sifter for compost. All amazing gifts.

But they also brought me two boxes filled with old journals and toys and folders filled with work from college workshops. The most exciting things in those boxes were letters. As soon as they left town, I poured over them. Letters from kids from church camp (that includes you Kris Hale!). Postcards and letters from friends from high school while they vacationed with family. Letters from old boyfriends and professors and even some folks who I don't remember and so am not sure how to classify. The best, though, were letters from my friends Casey and Alex.

While I was finishing up undergrad, living in a house near the center of a tiny town in the foothills of the Appalachians, Casey had moved to Chicago and Alex was studying in Tubingen, Germany. From Athens, OH, both of those locations seemed equally far away and romantic and exotic. And seeing those letters brought back memories of that time and the feelings wrapped up in letters into sharp delightful focus.


I remember vaguely the act of writing letters. Making drawings, trying to collect interesting stories so that I had something worthwhile to share, needing to be entertaining for my friends who I wrote faithfully to. But I remember far more clearly the waiting for letters, the excitement that one might show up in the mail, the sitting in the swing on the front porch, ignoring my housemates and taking the time with a cup of tea and the view of the green mountains in the distance to pour over Casey and Alex's letters. Their stories were amazing and I believe deeply that reading about the portions of the lives that they shared prompted me to make my life more exciting so that I would have stories to send back. Language pushing me to take more action and pursue adventures every day to shape me back into compelling language to write down and send away to Chicago and Germany.


But until I saw all of the old letters, I'd kind of forgotten that this was something we used to do. In college, there was no internet, no email, no cell phones. Long distance calls were expensive, and so the only way to stay deeply in touch was by writing letters. And it's amazing the kinds of things we would write down and willingly send into someone else's hands. Nowadays, I think long and hard about what I write down and give to another person. If a message gets too tricky, a conversation too difficult or political or emotional, I call and have that conversation purposefully to keep the conversation from coming back to haunt me later in print.

But back in the day, we wrote fierce, complicated, heartrending stuff. We were trying to write our full selves down. We were trying to elicit responses from people, wrenching at them and their hearts so that they would have no other choice but to follow suit and write back. Letter writing was exciting and dangerous and manipulative and filled with joy.

And I miss it.

(remember this Casey? that you would send me, out of the blue, poetry?)

Casey and I often referred to each other as Kafka (me) and Bukowski (her). I think that had something to do with ill-chosen men that we had let into our lives. Those were their favorite writers and we were making fun of the seriousness of men. Alex would send me stories about train rides and drinking wine and larger mountains than my own and at night I would dream about narrow cobblestone roads winding up hill through tightly packed storefronts and overhanging second story living quarters, lined with flower boxes and the sounds of barking dogs. Letters multiplied my life, allowing me to live in their lives while having my own.


This last card is a mystery. It could be from Alex, but it may have been from my boyfriend Alex. They had the same handwriting, the same sense of humor. And Alex-boyfriend never wrote anything romantic in his letters. . . until things had ended and there was romance in his anger. I have that letter, too. So, I like to think this card is from Alex-friend, but it's strange and lovely either way.