Song 20260818-030009
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The envelopes started arriving in March, postmarked from a town that was demolished in 1967 to build a reservoir. The handwriting is unmistakably my grandmother's, though she died before I learned to read. Her news often included:
1) One of my aunts or uncles gave birth to so-and-so's fifth child. The depressions at the end of paragraphs and exclamations mark nerves already strung to the breaking point. She sounds exhausted.
2) Or, an aunt or uncle talked a parent or sibling down from a ledge. Every year that passed brought more depression and suicide attempts to my father's and grandfather's sides of the family, hardly mentioned among my grandparents' broadsheet of Philadelphia neighborhoods and family gossip.
3) Or, someone she knew died of cancer -- five cases in 2006, which would have been 60% of the year's memorials.
4) If I sent a letter afterward with a birthday date, I got a smattering of postcards, postmarked from the edge of a massive national park.
5) If she thought about me, which she did, reluctantly, a simple message -- this would have been clear at a glance if I had used her typewriter -- "I wonder how you are?" Sometimes she'd enclose a piece of news; once or twice, a postcard (admit it -- you want the postcard).
There is something intimate about communication that arrives nearly a year or more after it is written. After several months, it seems as if the circumstances haven't passed. Replying ordinarily feels like a false beginning, given how much has passed since. There is a different time for the letter to be read. She intended her letters for Ages To Come.
I have been writing again, trying to return the letter to the present. I don't write about myself with much detail, though, prompting her almost apologetic post: "I know next to nothing about how you are and your life." Maybe half the reasons she doesn't know are reasons she never asks. It's uncomfortable to ask, burning those bridges that lead across thin distances, uncomfortable enough to fuel a stagnation I never anticipated. (Her evasion of those questions is another reason I have been and may continue to be more candid than she.)
Inevitably, a letter arrives. Despite the space years carve between her generation and mine, none of what I write seems to frighten her too much. What frightens her today, I suspect, is some ordinary day when the pancreas or some other cancerous mini-bomb◆ About the ending