Beth, thank you for this beauty. I was going through some dresser drawers the other day and ran across a birthday card from my dad. He gave it to me in 2023, I think, and he passed away last May. It says, in his own hybrid cursive-print: "Dear Nance, Could go on at great length about you but my shaky hand will only allow my great love for you. Love you so much, Dad." I will treasure it always.
Caul. Tissue thin. Yellowed like ancient paper though not paper but amniotic sac, artifact of my own body protecting my face and head when my mother pushed me out in a gush of birthwater.Sailors would have given her good money for it. To save them from drowning. She never sold it. It was to save me.
I had finished writing a manuscript for a memoir. i had explored a life that was overshadowed with the pain of feeling as if my mother didn't love me as much as she had loved my younger sister. My sister and I had definitely grown up in two completely different homes. Our memories of childhood almost always diverge at the main points. "Remember how mom used to do such and such? I would ask." "No," my sister would usually say. Then a manilla envelope came...not all that long ago (I'm now 73). In it was a letter from my mother's brother written to his grandmother the year I was born. A few months after he wrote the letter, he would be dead. I thought he had committed suicide when my mother was a teenager, giving her time to at least somewhat recover by the time she married and had children. Now I find that he committed suicide soon after I was born, and it was shocking for her mother, and wasn't neat or tidy, but loud and messy, leaving my mother to help her own mom through a horrible time instead of bonding with me, her baby. This letter changed everything for me. It changed my story. It changed how I felt about my mother.
Linda, this is so important. THIS is the power of paper. A very similar thing happened to me (I write of this in My Life in Paper)—letters discovered long after my parents are no longer here that redefine my relationship to them both. I stand in solidarity, Linda.
Thank you Beth! I wonder sometimes when I tell this story if people think I'm just putting a better spin on things...telling myself a different story instead of there actually being a different story. Your words mean a lot!
After my mother died, I found a large reed basket in the attic containing all her personal correspondence in neatly organized stacks. It helped me in my grief to return the cherished letters to their senders and get closer to the people who wrote to her and knew her in ways unavailable to me.
(I live in a constantly changing beautiful faraway place.)
High up in my bedroom closet where secrets are kept in old shoe boxes that smell of must and maybe the smell of mice who found perfect bedding material of my old letters from lovers, friends and family, safely out of reach of any reasonable reason for going there, lives my past.
As many times as fingers, I have set about to torch these memories, though not terrible ones, just reminders of roads that could have taken me anywhere, where I get lost among the words of a person or persons I hardly remember.
Mixed in with the letters are photos of people and places that could belong to anyone.
I don’t even recognize myself even though I know for certain it is me.
But after a time the boxes are returned to their safekeeping, I climb down off the stool and return gradually to my presence.
How you place us right there, with the must and the maybe mice. And how you return to your present moment, leaving your past in tact, still. Leave it in tact, Georgetta. It will keep changing, with you, over time.
She never learned to drive, and she never used a recipe. When she got older, my mom picked her up on weekends and they cooked in our kitchen. She asked my great-grandmother to write it down for us, and now it has been folded hundreds of times, each crease a reminder. The words written by shaky hands and oil splatters on the page. I can hear the sizzle of the onions and garlic, smell the meat browning. I’ve been vegetarian for 13 years and I’ll never make the meatballs, but I’ll never get rid of the recipe either.
In spite of being the firstborn grandchild, I got last dibs on her things when my grandmother passed away. All of her beautiful antiques were gone, the jewelry reduced to cheap costume stuff, her fantastic book collection in drooping heaps on the carpet. Poking through the piles, I picked up a crumbling pile of pages that once composed a cookbook. Ironic, because I hate cooking and my grandmother never cooked unless absolutely necessary. But something made me pick it up. It rested in a box untouched for several years until one day I ran across it. Inside was the incredible spidery floral handwriting of my maternal great great grandmother Browne. The recipes included a remedy for cholera. It's one of my most treasured possessions.
How special... When my son was getting married in the 90's I invited my Mother and Sister to send my new daughter in law some special family recipes. Nothing fancy, I just got some variously colored index cards and we all sent some recipes. Thought nothing about it even when they divorced some years later... After my Mother's recent death, I got a package in the mail from my first daughter in law. It contained all the recipe cards and she said that she sent them because she thought I would want the ones in my Mother's handwriting. Such an amazing thing to think about in my time of loss. Your book offer reminds me of this. Thank you
Very little compares to holding those recipes in one's hand ... and perhaps trying to see through the stains to know whether it was 3/4 of a cup or.... I am so sorry for your recent loss. I honor you during this time.
The postmark on the paled envelope was December 16, 1968, just months before I would marry for what I thought was love. Fifty-four years later her letter slid to the floor as I searched for a photo among the crisp leaf-brown pages of my childhood scrapbook. Things unspoken inked on pink tissue in my mother’s perfect hand.
”Bring me with you, or I will die”, said my grandmother to the Swedish Red Cross staff when they came to Vienna to bring malnourished children to Sweden after the end of WWI. The age limit was 13 and she was 14, but they let her into the bus. She kept a diary for her first years in Sweden, in carefully crafted kurrent. Lost in a new country at first, but after a while, Swedish words found their way in between the German, and in the final entries just a few German words remained. Short entries about her daily todoings, and hiding behind them, shadows of her teenage woes.
An old shoebox found me after my parent’s divorce. Inside: original photos of my dad’s side of the family. Mom didn’t want it. (Dad didn’t know about it?) Fished out from under my grandparent’s trailer home, in the humid muck of northeast Georgia, evidence of a much more glamorous time. My favorites? Three passport photos of my grandmother–16, fresh faced with freshwater pearls around her neck. The same passport that sent her to France on a student exchange for 1 year–to southern France and a house with a foyer chandelier, to a path by the sea while wearing a fancy dress, to the back of a horse in some sort of courtyard. Then, a college photo “To my loving brother, Hal. Love, Joanie” scrawled on the corner. A child’s birthday party on a yacht. And, pictures with her mother–always her and her mother: at the beach, in a garden, at a large house. All of this a far cry from the trailer home under the pines.
Your book sounds breathtaking! Best of luck with your launch.
These old photographs that tell these almost stories, Kate. Do you know the book Half in Shade by Judith Kitchen? You might love to read that, with your own photos at your side.
A nearly fifty-year journey may be coming to fruition, to some reflective composure, some reflective closure...or maybe not quite. Maybe, rather, an opening, an unravelling, and new insights or discoveries. Back to that time (1976-1978), before inexpensive and predictable telephone service, cell phones, email or text messages...back only to the days of picture postcards and frail, pale-blue aerograms neatly folded bottom-to-top and sides-in to protect the precious words and letters, the daily experiences, the precious memories...I mailed some type of missive to my Minnesota family, every other week, from my Peace Corps service as a nursing instructor in the Middle East. A collection of nearly 100 postcards, letters, or cards were collected and saved by my mother. Neatly organized in a blue flowered photo album as a keepsake of my two year journey, I have never read any of them since writing them.
This collection has been with me since my return in 1978, sometimes carried in a maroon Peace Corps tote bag, sometimes nestled in a covered cardboard box with other artifacts from my travels, through five moves, 2 marriages, and now, in retirement, it has finally resurfaced. And I am, somewhat hesitantly, preparing to settle in to my story of those 2 years. What will I find? What grief, laughter, growth, relationships, treasures, and losses will unfold? These await me and beg a story, weaving all these sentiments together...a twenty-five year old girl, writing from a culture halfway across the world, and learning about herself in the process.
Deb, I have chills reading this. Yourself—waiting for you all these years. Yourself—on the precipice of ready. Gorgeous and my goodness, best wishes on this journey you are about to embark on.
My father typed his memoir's first (and only) page the day before Thanksgiving 1963. "Well I finally made it! For some time now I have toyed with the idea to do some writing, but as the saying goes ‘The mind was always willing though the flesh was always weak.’” He died five days before Christmas. I was five.
Fifty years later, a cousin delivered a three-inch thick binder my East German grandmother maintained chronicling her firstborn son's life as an East German boy, an immigrant to the US, a husband, and a father of three. When he escaped their home behind the Berlin Wall, letters were their sole communication. She copied each letter from handwritten German script to easily readable German typewritten print. Did she know future generations would not be able to read handwriting? Did she know my mother was incapable of talking about him – her heart and life shattered? With Google Translate, can I finally get to know him? And maybe write an epistolary biography – to finish the memoir he started.
Debbie!!! This is extraordinary. Right here. This feels like the beginning of a book. Do you know that I once wrote a novel for teens that imagined the life of a boy in East Germany in 1983, and his escape? I am so moved by this. Finish his memoir.
Wow Beth I had no idea about your book! I can’t wait to read it! And thank you for the encouragement. I’ve written quite a few essays related to my father and I do feel like this approach could be the one. When I saw your original post it felt like a sign as I had just restarted working my way through the letter translations. Thanks again for all you offer.
In a photograph my grandfather sits on a sofa in our house wearing a gray suit, his hair still just thick enough to brush back in his usual style, stubble bristling on wrinkled cheeks in spots that his razor, guided by hands that now trembled, missed that morning.
Getting older, I’m more and more grateful for these images that help me remember, that often trigger a long-forgotten feeling, an emotion, or even a since-rejected perspective. There are photographs in albums and frames, tucked into books and wallets, and, less reverentially, stuffed into plastic sandwich bags then stored away on garage shelves. As I age past menopause, my memory has changed; like my body, it’s no longer supple and strong. Instead, it has become patchy, like the mangy fur of a stray dog in the streets of a South American city. Increasingly, there is blank space and white noise where once were fine strokes, rich colors, layered harmonies. Perhaps it is because of this particular photograph, one now lost but still in my memory, that I retain a certain image of my grandfather. Who can say how much I would remember without it of my grandfather's appearance: his daily uniform, his dignified affect, his serious expression?
This photograph invariably reminds me of a letter my grandfather wrote to my father some time after his visit with us. The image of my grandfather in a certain place at a certain age is associated, forever, with that one letter. In this letter one thing stands out, more of a comment than a question: “I understand that an infidel will be joining the family.”
Infidel.
At the time I didn't know enough to be offended for my fiancé—the Arab, the Muslim, the infidel.
My Dad was a journalist and an avid reader and, in his long widowed years, continued to send snippets from The Times to us his children. Mine were often obituaries of authors I admired, and at the top would be written, with no trace of irony, 'you may perhaps have missed this...'
Dad knew full-well of course that my life at the time had no wriggle-room for browsing the broadsheets.
I would often tuck the cuttings into the relevant author's work. Years later, when browsing my bookshelves for an old favourite to reread, I will come across them. I loved my Dad, who was a distant figure at times, having grown up in a very different world, and unaccustomed to sharing his feelings. But of his thoughtful care for us as individuals I have no doubt. I miss him still...
Janey—your dad bringing you the news that you would need on that day and years later. The ongoing gift of him. Thank you for this, from your beautiful faraway place.
Some years ago I helped my father to clear out a house that was due for renovation. As we tilted an old upright piano through a narrow doorway a box of letters fell out from somewhere inside. Upon showing them to the owner (the grown son of the couple who wrote the letters) he laughed and said 'what would I want with that crap' and then instructed me to throw them in the skip. Never one to follow instructions, I took them home with me and the box now sits proudly on my bookshelf!!
PS I'm in Ireland so postage would be too high to send me anything, but I look forward to buying your book when its published 💜
😅 they were engaged to be married and he had gone to London to earn money to start their lives together. The letters were filled with plans for their future and news of impending war…and of course beautiful declarations of love ❤️
Beth, thank you for this beauty. I was going through some dresser drawers the other day and ran across a birthday card from my dad. He gave it to me in 2023, I think, and he passed away last May. It says, in his own hybrid cursive-print: "Dear Nance, Could go on at great length about you but my shaky hand will only allow my great love for you. Love you so much, Dad." I will treasure it always.
This one sends me straight back in my chair, Nancy. Just — wow. To have been loved so freely and openly.
Caul. Tissue thin. Yellowed like ancient paper though not paper but amniotic sac, artifact of my own body protecting my face and head when my mother pushed me out in a gush of birthwater.Sailors would have given her good money for it. To save them from drowning. She never sold it. It was to save me.
Unbelievable, Geraldine. Utterly unexpected and wonderfully powerful.
Thank you so much Beth, a lovely prompt to get me back writing. Best wishes from the west of Ireland.
I had to do a little research as this was so intriguing!
I had finished writing a manuscript for a memoir. i had explored a life that was overshadowed with the pain of feeling as if my mother didn't love me as much as she had loved my younger sister. My sister and I had definitely grown up in two completely different homes. Our memories of childhood almost always diverge at the main points. "Remember how mom used to do such and such? I would ask." "No," my sister would usually say. Then a manilla envelope came...not all that long ago (I'm now 73). In it was a letter from my mother's brother written to his grandmother the year I was born. A few months after he wrote the letter, he would be dead. I thought he had committed suicide when my mother was a teenager, giving her time to at least somewhat recover by the time she married and had children. Now I find that he committed suicide soon after I was born, and it was shocking for her mother, and wasn't neat or tidy, but loud and messy, leaving my mother to help her own mom through a horrible time instead of bonding with me, her baby. This letter changed everything for me. It changed my story. It changed how I felt about my mother.
Linda, this is so important. THIS is the power of paper. A very similar thing happened to me (I write of this in My Life in Paper)—letters discovered long after my parents are no longer here that redefine my relationship to them both. I stand in solidarity, Linda.
Thank you Beth! I wonder sometimes when I tell this story if people think I'm just putting a better spin on things...telling myself a different story instead of there actually being a different story. Your words mean a lot!
Not at all. Our stories evolve and evolve and evolve. Because the evidence keeps arriving.
After my mother died, I found a large reed basket in the attic containing all her personal correspondence in neatly organized stacks. It helped me in my grief to return the cherished letters to their senders and get closer to the people who wrote to her and knew her in ways unavailable to me.
(I live in a constantly changing beautiful faraway place.)
Oh my word, Claire. This is so succinctly gorgeous and moving. Thank you for these words.
High up in my bedroom closet where secrets are kept in old shoe boxes that smell of must and maybe the smell of mice who found perfect bedding material of my old letters from lovers, friends and family, safely out of reach of any reasonable reason for going there, lives my past.
As many times as fingers, I have set about to torch these memories, though not terrible ones, just reminders of roads that could have taken me anywhere, where I get lost among the words of a person or persons I hardly remember.
Mixed in with the letters are photos of people and places that could belong to anyone.
I don’t even recognize myself even though I know for certain it is me.
But after a time the boxes are returned to their safekeeping, I climb down off the stool and return gradually to my presence.
How you place us right there, with the must and the maybe mice. And how you return to your present moment, leaving your past in tact, still. Leave it in tact, Georgetta. It will keep changing, with you, over time.
She never learned to drive, and she never used a recipe. When she got older, my mom picked her up on weekends and they cooked in our kitchen. She asked my great-grandmother to write it down for us, and now it has been folded hundreds of times, each crease a reminder. The words written by shaky hands and oil splatters on the page. I can hear the sizzle of the onions and garlic, smell the meat browning. I’ve been vegetarian for 13 years and I’ll never make the meatballs, but I’ll never get rid of the recipe either.
Jocelyn, this is beautiful. Each crease a reminder, a kept artifact, a something true. Thank you for sharing this —
Thanks so much Beth! Thanks for offering this prompt as I never would have written it without it!
The beauty of prompts, I think. But also: I’ve been thinking now of offering a prompt each month here. There are so many beautiful voices.
In spite of being the firstborn grandchild, I got last dibs on her things when my grandmother passed away. All of her beautiful antiques were gone, the jewelry reduced to cheap costume stuff, her fantastic book collection in drooping heaps on the carpet. Poking through the piles, I picked up a crumbling pile of pages that once composed a cookbook. Ironic, because I hate cooking and my grandmother never cooked unless absolutely necessary. But something made me pick it up. It rested in a box untouched for several years until one day I ran across it. Inside was the incredible spidery floral handwriting of my maternal great great grandmother Browne. The recipes included a remedy for cholera. It's one of my most treasured possessions.
The incredible spidery handwriting — my gosh — of a great great grandmother. This gives me chills, Beth. A remedy for cholera!
How special... When my son was getting married in the 90's I invited my Mother and Sister to send my new daughter in law some special family recipes. Nothing fancy, I just got some variously colored index cards and we all sent some recipes. Thought nothing about it even when they divorced some years later... After my Mother's recent death, I got a package in the mail from my first daughter in law. It contained all the recipe cards and she said that she sent them because she thought I would want the ones in my Mother's handwriting. Such an amazing thing to think about in my time of loss. Your book offer reminds me of this. Thank you
I actually wrote mine before reading yours. How interesting that we both got recipes with handwriting!! Treasure!!
Very little compares to holding those recipes in one's hand ... and perhaps trying to see through the stains to know whether it was 3/4 of a cup or.... I am so sorry for your recent loss. I honor you during this time.
The postmark on the paled envelope was December 16, 1968, just months before I would marry for what I thought was love. Fifty-four years later her letter slid to the floor as I searched for a photo among the crisp leaf-brown pages of my childhood scrapbook. Things unspoken inked on pink tissue in my mother’s perfect hand.
You write so well.
You bring me straight into your memoir, Char. That moment. That decision. The unspoken now said.
”Bring me with you, or I will die”, said my grandmother to the Swedish Red Cross staff when they came to Vienna to bring malnourished children to Sweden after the end of WWI. The age limit was 13 and she was 14, but they let her into the bus. She kept a diary for her first years in Sweden, in carefully crafted kurrent. Lost in a new country at first, but after a while, Swedish words found their way in between the German, and in the final entries just a few German words remained. Short entries about her daily todoings, and hiding behind them, shadows of her teenage woes.
Josefin in Sweden
Oh, Josefin! This is SUCH treasure. My goodness.
Thank you! I can’t wait to read your book 📖
An old shoebox found me after my parent’s divorce. Inside: original photos of my dad’s side of the family. Mom didn’t want it. (Dad didn’t know about it?) Fished out from under my grandparent’s trailer home, in the humid muck of northeast Georgia, evidence of a much more glamorous time. My favorites? Three passport photos of my grandmother–16, fresh faced with freshwater pearls around her neck. The same passport that sent her to France on a student exchange for 1 year–to southern France and a house with a foyer chandelier, to a path by the sea while wearing a fancy dress, to the back of a horse in some sort of courtyard. Then, a college photo “To my loving brother, Hal. Love, Joanie” scrawled on the corner. A child’s birthday party on a yacht. And, pictures with her mother–always her and her mother: at the beach, in a garden, at a large house. All of this a far cry from the trailer home under the pines.
Your book sounds breathtaking! Best of luck with your launch.
These old photographs that tell these almost stories, Kate. Do you know the book Half in Shade by Judith Kitchen? You might love to read that, with your own photos at your side.
I’m not familiar with that one. I’ll put it on my list! Thank you for the recommendation!
A nearly fifty-year journey may be coming to fruition, to some reflective composure, some reflective closure...or maybe not quite. Maybe, rather, an opening, an unravelling, and new insights or discoveries. Back to that time (1976-1978), before inexpensive and predictable telephone service, cell phones, email or text messages...back only to the days of picture postcards and frail, pale-blue aerograms neatly folded bottom-to-top and sides-in to protect the precious words and letters, the daily experiences, the precious memories...I mailed some type of missive to my Minnesota family, every other week, from my Peace Corps service as a nursing instructor in the Middle East. A collection of nearly 100 postcards, letters, or cards were collected and saved by my mother. Neatly organized in a blue flowered photo album as a keepsake of my two year journey, I have never read any of them since writing them.
This collection has been with me since my return in 1978, sometimes carried in a maroon Peace Corps tote bag, sometimes nestled in a covered cardboard box with other artifacts from my travels, through five moves, 2 marriages, and now, in retirement, it has finally resurfaced. And I am, somewhat hesitantly, preparing to settle in to my story of those 2 years. What will I find? What grief, laughter, growth, relationships, treasures, and losses will unfold? These await me and beg a story, weaving all these sentiments together...a twenty-five year old girl, writing from a culture halfway across the world, and learning about herself in the process.
Deb, I have chills reading this. Yourself—waiting for you all these years. Yourself—on the precipice of ready. Gorgeous and my goodness, best wishes on this journey you are about to embark on.
Thank you so much. I'm following you, and have been for some years. You're my heroine. 😘
Oh my word, Deb. Thank you.
Looking forward to this afternoon's Cleaver Masterclass with you.🙂
Hello, Deb! Can’t wait to see you!!
My father typed his memoir's first (and only) page the day before Thanksgiving 1963. "Well I finally made it! For some time now I have toyed with the idea to do some writing, but as the saying goes ‘The mind was always willing though the flesh was always weak.’” He died five days before Christmas. I was five.
Fifty years later, a cousin delivered a three-inch thick binder my East German grandmother maintained chronicling her firstborn son's life as an East German boy, an immigrant to the US, a husband, and a father of three. When he escaped their home behind the Berlin Wall, letters were their sole communication. She copied each letter from handwritten German script to easily readable German typewritten print. Did she know future generations would not be able to read handwriting? Did she know my mother was incapable of talking about him – her heart and life shattered? With Google Translate, can I finally get to know him? And maybe write an epistolary biography – to finish the memoir he started.
Debbie!!! This is extraordinary. Right here. This feels like the beginning of a book. Do you know that I once wrote a novel for teens that imagined the life of a boy in East Germany in 1983, and his escape? I am so moved by this. Finish his memoir.
Wow Beth I had no idea about your book! I can’t wait to read it! And thank you for the encouragement. I’ve written quite a few essays related to my father and I do feel like this approach could be the one. When I saw your original post it felt like a sign as I had just restarted working my way through the letter translations. Thanks again for all you offer.
I am genuinely excited, Debbie, for you. It's a journey I love to take as a writer. A journey I can't wait for you to go on.
In a photograph my grandfather sits on a sofa in our house wearing a gray suit, his hair still just thick enough to brush back in his usual style, stubble bristling on wrinkled cheeks in spots that his razor, guided by hands that now trembled, missed that morning.
Getting older, I’m more and more grateful for these images that help me remember, that often trigger a long-forgotten feeling, an emotion, or even a since-rejected perspective. There are photographs in albums and frames, tucked into books and wallets, and, less reverentially, stuffed into plastic sandwich bags then stored away on garage shelves. As I age past menopause, my memory has changed; like my body, it’s no longer supple and strong. Instead, it has become patchy, like the mangy fur of a stray dog in the streets of a South American city. Increasingly, there is blank space and white noise where once were fine strokes, rich colors, layered harmonies. Perhaps it is because of this particular photograph, one now lost but still in my memory, that I retain a certain image of my grandfather. Who can say how much I would remember without it of my grandfather's appearance: his daily uniform, his dignified affect, his serious expression?
This photograph invariably reminds me of a letter my grandfather wrote to my father some time after his visit with us. The image of my grandfather in a certain place at a certain age is associated, forever, with that one letter. In this letter one thing stands out, more of a comment than a question: “I understand that an infidel will be joining the family.”
Infidel.
At the time I didn't know enough to be offended for my fiancé—the Arab, the Muslim, the infidel.
I was transfixed, Marianna, reading this. It rises and rises and then, shockingly and perfectly, it ends. A wonderful passage of prose.
Thank you, Beth! I've learned from the best!
My Dad was a journalist and an avid reader and, in his long widowed years, continued to send snippets from The Times to us his children. Mine were often obituaries of authors I admired, and at the top would be written, with no trace of irony, 'you may perhaps have missed this...'
Dad knew full-well of course that my life at the time had no wriggle-room for browsing the broadsheets.
I would often tuck the cuttings into the relevant author's work. Years later, when browsing my bookshelves for an old favourite to reread, I will come across them. I loved my Dad, who was a distant figure at times, having grown up in a very different world, and unaccustomed to sharing his feelings. But of his thoughtful care for us as individuals I have no doubt. I miss him still...
(from a faraway and beautiful place xx)
Janey—your dad bringing you the news that you would need on that day and years later. The ongoing gift of him. Thank you for this, from your beautiful faraway place.
Some years ago I helped my father to clear out a house that was due for renovation. As we tilted an old upright piano through a narrow doorway a box of letters fell out from somewhere inside. Upon showing them to the owner (the grown son of the couple who wrote the letters) he laughed and said 'what would I want with that crap' and then instructed me to throw them in the skip. Never one to follow instructions, I took them home with me and the box now sits proudly on my bookshelf!!
PS I'm in Ireland so postage would be too high to send me anything, but I look forward to buying your book when its published 💜
I love the rebel in you, Grainne! What a find. And what a keep. And what WERE those letters about anyway? xo
😅 they were engaged to be married and he had gone to London to earn money to start their lives together. The letters were filled with plans for their future and news of impending war…and of course beautiful declarations of love ❤️
How gorgeous, that you have this, for your forever.