I dare you to write a letter
“To write is human, to receive a letter: Divine!”
- Susan Landroth
Down an old street with buckling sidewalks and arching, old trees, there dwells a handsome house of brick. In this house memories float about from room to room, memories that are impervious to the passage of time. It is always the chosen ‘present tense’ I imagine as I enter the front door, stepping over a friendly, snoozing Boxer named Max. He lifts his head slightly and yawns in expectation of a scratch. He always gets one. Today, my present tense is twelve years old. It is summer and the rooms are thick with the humid pungence of wooden floors. I make my way up the familiar winding stairs and turn left into the front room where my mother is eternally folding and putting away laundry. I ask the old familiar question as I bounce upon her bed - may I look through the drawer? She always nods yes.
The drawer, when slid open, overflows with the sights and smells of a woman I have never known in any present tense - my mother at the beginning of things. There are ancient velvet boxes that spring open to reveal jewels I have never seen her wear, except in photos where she is laughing in the midst of top-hatted young men and giggling girls with beautifully coiffed hair. I pore over these photos and ask her over and over who this one is and that one, who liked who and did they marry? There are dried corsages that still smell vaguely of roses, handkerchiefs with embroidered violets, a black evening shawl with rhinestones, a stray brooch with a broken clasp. I pick each of them up with a care that enfolds a fragile past. I put the rings on my patient mother’s hand, a hand that now gives off the light but comforting scent of garlic mixed with laundry soap and only sports the round gold band that has become part of her finger. I make her tell me one story about something in the drawer. Over time, she tells me about parties, and skiing down Quebec hills, about tea parties involving gloves and lace handkerchiefs. I never get enough of these stories.
The finale to my bottom-drawer ritual always ends at an old, heart-shaped candy box. I lift the faded, ribboned lid and there they are. A packet of letters tied with a simple string. My father’s bold, broad hand is evident on each one. I just like to sit and gaze at it beneath the faded knot, this young man’s passion scrawled out in three words, “Ma Chere LouLou.” My father in love. My father, who now wears the old slippers and a threadbare sweater vest to pay his bills, was once a young man in a top hat declaring his undying love for Chere LouLou in letter after letter. At first, I was tempted to read them, but part of me was content with the fact that he called my mother LouLou and that she was his ‘cherie.’ This was a new aspect of my father that I had never experienced, nor would I ever have without his very love seeping through these letters in my hand. He became more real to me and in greater focus with this new discovery, and I had to rethink him now with this added nuance.
I have grown to love the word ‘nuance’ in my older age. The Oxford Dictionary defines nuance as, “a subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression or sound.” When speaking of nuanced people, we also mean quite the same thing. That they are complex and rich in meanings we need to patiently wait for. They are subtle. Children come by it naturally if they have loved their parents all along; if they have asked questions, were allowed in drawers, and were told stories. Only then do they realize how incredibly shaded with meaning their parents are and they grow to love them more. Learning to recognize nuances gives us an awed and humbled relationship with ourselves and with others. Nuances discovered build up love. And only time and an observant heart reveal nuances.
There are many pathways to this kind of revelation, but in my experience it is letters that best reveal the ‘deep down’ nuances. I have delved into those deeps and have always found treasure; letters written by famous people like Emily Dickinson, John James Audubon, Fr. Peter DeSmet, and Vincent Van Gogh to name a few. When you slowly open a volume of their letters and begin to read, you can actually see a person being drawn before your very eyes, with added dimension and subtler shades of color with each dated missive. Where before you held back in the two-dimensional awe of their respective and famous accomplishments, you now draw near to marvel that they sometimes felt exactly as you do, or that they took delight in the mundane niceties of the everyday – weather, flowers, if the bread rose satisfactorily or not, a poem tucked in for perusal and returned thoughts, how the lingering cold was progressing. And how they felt about all of it! These thoughts open the door to their very homes and hearts. Reading letters of any kind should be done with a hushed gratitude that you have been allowed into this world at all.
Letters are visceral. They are peculiar extensions of the deeper, feeling self – surfacing in the movement of a hand as it traces the letters in its unique penmanship on a piece of paper picked carefully off of a stack on a particular desk, in a particular room. Ink blots where emphasis was placed. Under-linings that signal a sudden passion either of the heart or mind that cries: this is important to me! So important, in fact, that sometimes a tear falls and smudges the next word and wrinkles the page just there – and remains. Letters are held by real hands and carefully creased by fingers enfolding the treasure of thoughts. They are sealed sometimes with wax dripped carefully by trembling hands that ache for the feel of a far-off face between them. They are sealed and pressed with a committed finality before being posted.
Letters are sensual things. Never have I ever read an email or an instant message that can even come close to holding a letter in my hands. Megabites have nothing on ink and paper. Megabites flatten nuance or make it as cold and hard as the angular boundaries of a laptop. You can’t lift an email to your face and smell the faint perfume that your lover wears soaked deliciously into the paper. You can’t clutch an instant message to your heart and then smooth the pages to read and re-read the love that is written there. Emails don’t carry the drop of upset wine that stained the page as emotions ran high while writing. You can’t put emails in a box tied up with string. You can’t press an email to your lips. Letters are visceral, sensual, committed, brave and magical things.
Emails and messages pass through some hidden, calculated, cyberspace in an instant. They are mostly always expected and received; but letters, in the true, dangerous romance of the thing depend on a long arduous journey from hand to hand; from planes to boats, wagons, and the hands of postmen in very small towns. I have always marveled myself that letters get anywhere at all since their voyage is so meandering and entrusted to imperfect humans.
Letters must be waited upon, and that very waiting builds up love and longing in those lonely vigils by the mailbox. When they finally arrive, there is catharsis! Fanny Brawne, the muse for John Keats’ every gorgeous word, waited in a very real, pacing anxiety for his letters when he was away from her. She could not rest in anything until she heard from him again. But once she held that letter full of his love, she could breathe and laugh and sew and accomplish great things. She could hold that folded paper close to her heart as a piece of his while she wrote her answer back. How much this reveals of Fanny’s need to be physically grafted, albeit through a thin sheet of paper, to her Keats.
"Van Gogh Letter & Drawing" by Uncleweed is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Father Peter De Smet, missionary in the New World of America, waited and waited unto utter loneliness for letters to reach him from far off Belgium. All he wanted was familiar news of his family, of babies born, of marriages. And this positive, strong, happy soul would beg desperately in his own letters for news and humbly confessed his great need of their encouragement, which gave him strength to lift his vocation up every day. He was not a two-dimensional super man – he was a nuanced man with weaknesses and needs that those letters reveal. And we discover that even saints need to clutch the love of friends in their hands to keep them from wilting into despondency.
Vincent Van Gogh signed all his letters to his brother Theo with: “..and accept a handshake I send in my thoughts..” as if to say that human touch, even through the medium of ink and paper, seals love and makes it real, especially to an artist who deals and dwells in touch by very nature of his art.
The genius naturalist, John James Audubon had to journey to far off England to find a market for his artistic masterpiece: The Birds of North America. He missed his wife and sons with the heartbreak that only the French can express. He had a passionate French heart as well that was tempted daily by women who flirted with him and caught his eye. His true north was always his wife Lucy. When her letters finally made their way from rural America to London, he broke into tears of relief – I swear I could almost hear him sobbing as he wrote in ink blotted haste– that she was still his one true love and his partner in inspiration. Her letters kept him true and faithful. What power! This waiting, this longing that letters produce reveals a flowering nuance of character like no other. The very waiting causes new insights and colors and dimensions in a person. It causes new love to rise from the deeps.
"John Audobon's Signature" by summerreader is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Even in my own life, a very worn and loved Valentine made by my husband eons ago reveals to my seasoned self the giddiness of the girl I was, steeped in the euphoria of first love. It always makes me stir from my sadder moments whenever I look upon it. I realize with more depth that my beloved loves on after all these years of added nuance.
I promise I am not a card-carrying Luddite. I don’t mind technology. It is a vehicle for so much that is good. But nuance belongs to letters. The human experience. The writing, the sealing, the sending, the trust that other humans will get them where they are going. Visceral, tactile, sensual. We need these so desperately in our detached cyber world of today that has smudged our nuances and made us afraid to feel. We need packets of letters in old candy boxes tied up with a string in bottom drawers of dressers. We need to experience the delicious danger of putting our ‘deep down’ feelings indelibly in ink to be read perhaps someday by a romantic little girl who never knew that part of us existed. She will thank us forever. And so, I dare you to find a quiet corner, a piece of beautiful paper and a pen. I dare you to write a letter.
